Surprises, washing and long-tailed tits

Posted on February 24, 2016 by hilarycustancegreen

This should be a serious post I planned about research and time, but as our broadband has been on the blink for a fortnight and there are things I have to attend to rather urgently. This is short and, I hope, sweet.

I went on Amazon to check something for my personal page on the Society of Authors website and found this, which is cheering. My husband decided the washing line merited a photo. And I tried so hard to get a photo of the long-tailed tits bathing. This is the best I could manage.

That’s it folks (if the our broadband works long enough to post it).

Mostly in, but occasionally allowed out

Posted on February 2, 2016 by hilarycustancegreen

My back aches.

I have been (willingly) chained to my desk for the past few weeks creating an index for my Far East POW book. It’s an occupation for the obsessive list-maker and one I didn’t expect to enjoy, but it has its satisfactions. It has also raised multiple research questions. I hang my head with embarrassment over the number of tiny textual errors I have discovered in the process. Yet everything discovered is one less error in the published version.

On Thursday the sun came out and I played truant from my desk for several hours to plant up my nursery of seedling maples – all offspring of Matsukaze or Sengokaku. I started with a pot or two and some compost…and then I needed the big cutters for some roots and more leaf mould and, and, and… By the time I started to clear up, the sun was going down.I know it all looks very dull now but there are eight Japanese maple seedlings between one and three years old in pots or in the ground, and in a couple of months they will be trembling with new leaves.

As I left a Robin circled over my working area and sat in the nearby tree to assess the changes to his territory.

Back to my desk, much refreshed.

Lion in winter

Posted on January 8, 2016 by hilarycustancegreen

This internet is sending us barmy, working one minute on, one off, taking minutes to load a page when it is working… grrr!

So here is what we did with our Christmas tree (old film, but same local lions still having fun).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJvWWOutseI

We are away for a day or two. So I may be jumping your next lovely posts.

In case I haven’t said it Happy New Year to you all!

Alma, a woman of science

Posted on December 22, 2015 by hilarycustancegreen

I have just read a book that has gone straight into my top ten, but explaining why is difficult. My daughter, sending it to me for my birthday, wrote; I really hope you like this book – it’s lots of fun & a bit bonkers, but a very enjoyable story and a brilliant heroine.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things has, above all things, a brilliant heroine.

I don’t remember a story so straightforwardly told and yet in which I was continually taken aback by the next turn of the narrative. This sense of being caught in mid-arabesque and sent in another direction persisted to the end of the last printed page – the acknowledgements. This is a long book and I wondered as I started, if I would ever get to the end. There were even moments when I thought, I’m not sure I like this book, yet I kept turning the pages. The narrative style is dry, yet moving; the subject matter is sometimes alarmingly microscopic, yet captivating; the narration is eyebrow-raisingly frank, yet always believable.

It is really a story about human curiosity, it might even be a story about growing old, or it might be a story about all the things that interest the reader most. If I had my way, which of course I won’t, everyone would read it. Almost all women would find great enjoyment here. Women who work in the sciences should search it out and consume it.

Gilbert also wrote the best-selling autobiographical, Eat Pray Love, which seems to have divided readers into lovers and haters. I can’t tell which I will be, but I have a feeling that The Signature of All Things is a very different story. In this one Gilbert has slotted total fiction into a very real and fact-filled part of western history.

Oh, and it’s a garden lover’s paradise too. It more or less starts in Kew Garden and ends in… but I’d hate to be guilty of a spoiler.

Happy Winter Solstice, Christmas, New Year or whatever you are celebrating.

Here is a happy Garrya elliptica and some surprised daffodils. I saw winter aconites out in a nearby garden!

Sunset, bees in December, sunrise

Posted on December 6, 2015 by hilarycustancegreen

Truly there are bees (look harder), but my photography is a bit challenged.

A couple of mornings ago, I was making our pre-getting up pot of tea, when my husband called out ‘look out of the window!’. I did, tied my dressing gown, then grabbed a camera and went out of the back door for this shot – facing East. Then, devoutly hoping the paper boy would not appear at that moment, I went out of the front door for this gentler western one. Today I saw that the iris stylosa (or unguicularis), are going for broke. Winter?

The joys of leaf mould and November blooms.

Posted on November 19, 2015 by hilarycustancegreen

I have spent the last thirty years trying to get some substance and water retention into our dry sandy soil. A few years ago I try to make leaf mould in old compost bags. I checked the bags at 6 months, 1 year, 18 months… and found… a pile of soggy leaves.

Yet I still felt that autumn leaves were too precious to put in the municipal compost bins. So I netted off an area under the trees at the back of the garden and just threw leaves in there… and there they stayed year after year looking like dead leaves.

Then a couple of years ago I was clearing a corner by the water butts
and found the original bags full of… leaf mould! This year my husband pointed out that the area I had netted off had… turned into leaf mould. I found another log and ivy-infested area between the trees at the back of the garden.

And, with the help of a robin or two (he’s in there somewhere) I cleared this, netted it, and filled it with leaves. All I have to do now is wait for five years…And this is where the hedgehog may be about to hibernate (he is still feeding) After all those unexciting images here are some November blooms.

A final goodbye, the new front line

Posted on November 1, 2015 by hilarycustancegreen

I’ve been away from my blog for a few days saying a final goodbye to my 102-year-old uncle. He was indomitable, subversively funny, and energetic beyond imagining – for instance he celebrated his eightieth birthday by climbing eight Munros (Scottish mountains over 3000 feet). He was the last living close family member of my parent’s generation, and with his death we are now the front line. So be it.

We travelled up to the Highlands of Scotland, through a beautiful autumnal England and said goodbye in brilliant sunshine. I meant to take photos, but was too involved talking to the family. As we left yesterday it rained and I took one photo. This road leads up a steep hill to the house that he and my aunt built in the 1970s, and where we spent many happy holidays walking in the Cairngorms.

Here, instead, are some images of autumn from further south.

The unexpected haunting of the River Kwai

Posted on October 16, 2015 by hilarycustancegreen

Last month we had a wonderful holiday with family on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan, with sunsets, wine-tasting and much good American food. Tabor Hill Winery

On one of our expeditions we visited the Fernwood Botanical Garden. There were woodland walks, prairie meadows and formal areas, but one particular display grabbed our interest for a long time. We became kids again. A walk-in area of wooden structures and natural landscape with trains running in and out and suddenly reappearing where you least expected them. It was wonderfully complex, engaging and utterly charming. There was so much to see, we didn’t know which way to look. We watched these trains dipping in and out of the foliage, creeping round the sheer edge of a wooden cliff, or traversing great gaps balanced on twig like structures. Yet all the while I felt a sense of haunting, a constant tug by the images of another railway. This is the Wampo (Wang Pho) viaduct, and this Fernwood. and this shows the bamboo scaffolding for the Bridge on the Mae Klaung (now renamed Kwai)and Far East prisoners of war and conscripted labourers at work on the Thailand-Burma railway in 1942/1943. This is Fernwood again.

Some of us cannot forget.

The waiting season

Posted on October 9, 2015 by hilarycustancegreen

I find myself prowling the garden, waiting for the dramas of autumn. Some of them are underway already. Though summer has not yet retired and tomatoes and apples (Blenheim Orange) are still ripening, This rhododendron (Morgenrot) thinks it is spring.

No idea what this frog is thinking. We have no pond, but I bump into frogs a few times every year (he is a frog; he is smooth-skinned and he jumps). There are roses (Alec’s Red – knockout scent and cosmos (Chocamocha) in flower and even the odd sweet pea. What I am really waiting for is the maples to change colour. I am impatient to know which of my new seedlings has the best autumn glow. This impatience is foolish, I must not wish the summer away and the marigolds (Calendula) in the veg plot are still covered in blooms a joy to behold.And there is plenty of drama (Pampas Grass) in the botanical gardens.

Temporary absence

Posted on September 12, 2015 by hilarycustancegreen

I’m going away… for ten days. I am sorry for all your posts I will miss, but my only hope of sanity is to leap into the future when I return. By this time I hope some more tomatoes will be ripening and that neighbours will have picked the ones that are already ripe.

I look forward to eating our unnamed delicious apples (the tree came labelled Victoria plum).and in late in October our Blenheim Orange. But sadly, we will not be eating tasty leeks next spring, because the dastardly leek moth hath got them – useful information here: http://www.getseedy.co.uk/2011/09/whos-been-eating-my-leeks/