Ravendale House

I’m pleased to report that the visiting moorhen is still here. I didn’t see him at all yesterday, but he made an appearance after lunch today, so that’s OK.

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First of all I feel I should come clean and say that I’m a bit of a ‘bah humbug’ person when it comes to Xmas. I think it’s probably the result of having no children and no close family. Don’t get me wrong, I used to love it, but as I’ve got older it has become less and less significant or meaningful.

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The first week in November has come and gone, and still the garden birds have not appeared in great numbers.

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This gardening year will mostly be remembered for it’s weather. We were snowed in for 2 weeks before last Xmas, we’ve had no snow whatsoever this year (so far),  it hasn’t been particularly warm but it has been pretty dry and we’ve had lots and lots of wind.

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I think we all know how spectacular flowering cherry trees are in Spring, ours are a mass of pure white flowers. But what I often forget is how equally spectacular they are in Autumn.

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So there I was, enjoying a glorious Autumn day in the garden, busily pruning my hardy fuchsias with my 24p secateurs, and thinking to myself what an excellent purchase they’d been. In short, I was feeling smug. Then disaster struck.

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For thousands of years mankind has been growing plants, for food, medicine and pleasure. Packets of seeds, potted up plants, pricked out seedlings are  commonplace and familiar to all of us. Yesterday I came upon something I’ve never seen before.

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Todays tally . . . . . .

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It’s becoming a daily routine, walk around the field and see what bizarre or grizzly thing you can find that wasn’t there yesterday, and so it was today.

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As the title suggests, this post is all about getting the garden ready for winter, which, if it’s anything like last year, came early and severely, long before Xmas.

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