June garden

Summer is almost here. There's no mistaking that wet grass scent or the slightly heavier humid air that so distinctly belongs to early summer mornings. The village gets busier as the summer crops inch closer to harvest. Just today I've watched a ride on mower, two oversized John Deere tractors, 2 or 3 smaller tractors, and some sort of intricate looking ploughing(?) contraption thunder past the cottage. For a teeny, tiny village hamlet, the roads are getting quite backed up with farm vehicles and the like.

Everywhere I look signs of summer are making themselves known. Sweet peas, barley, elderflowers, delphinium, and roses. There is so much colour and life.

In my garden I am clipping roses and larkspur. As well as eyeing-off the elderflower blossoms for cordial making. But back to the roses...

This powdery pink beauty is David Austin's The Ancient Mariner. Named after Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, it is a large and impressive rose in all senses of the word. A prolific repeat flowering rose, it can grow up to 5ft tall by 3ft wide. It has a lovely scent- like most DA roses- and its beauty is evident from bright pink bud through to faded fully reflexed blooms. This is a relatively new Austin rose, released in the last couple of years here in the UK, and only now becoming available in the US and Canada. She should flower abundantly until the first frost in November.

The slightly more apricot pink rose is another DA, The Queen of Sweden. She begins as a very peachy-apricot, almost orange bud, opening to that iconic cup shape associated with Austin roses with a faded apricot-blush hue. The mature blooms fade even further, just before they finish and shatter, to an almost pale tea-stained hue. I favour her scent and shape, and I think she has much better 'staying power' when clipped for a vase.

The larkspur has been so welcome for the bees. I've left these tall flowering spires well alone except for the two stems I cut for a little garden posy gift to take to a new friend. It paired so beautifully with the pink of the roses.

 Also left well alone as much as possible has been the robin nest in our garden wall. I have been watching our resident robin pair building and fussing over their nest for a few weeks now, and noticed in the last week Mrs Robin has been diligently sitting on eggs. Today she was flitting around the garden and beyond for an extended amount of time (feeding perhaps?), so I took the opportunity to peer into the nest to count the eggs. I think there are three, it is difficult to see all the way into her delicate and cosy nest because it is in quite a tight nook in the dry-stone wall. My phone camera could just about capture one little speckled egg. The sweetest thing I've seen this week I think.

Hopefully she can manage to hatch her entire clutch! The weather is certainly very nice for her. Seven new tiny ducklings have also appeared on the brook. I spotted them from a window last night, so I rushed outside to the brook, barefoot, to count them. 

Kate  x

Lacock village and abbey

Lacock is renowned for its quintessentially english village streets. It is a Cotswold tourist highlight, but the National Trust owned abbey is the real must see here in my opinion.

We wandered around the village on a drizzly Monday afternoon, so the streets were relatively quiet for June. It is easy to see how Lacock got its reputation as a village that seems to have paused in the 18th Century, the cars being the only indication of modern life.

Spot the dog!

There are a few different places to have lunch, a cream tea, or an ice cream. Of course, the National Trust tea rooms are always a nice place to get a cuppa, sandwich, or something sweet. 

In the abbey grounds there is so much to see. A walled garden, green house, rose garden, orchard, as well as the extensive park. Last week the early summer blooms were at their peak. Allium, delphinium, roses, etc. there was so much colour and life.

I love to see summer grass left to grow with wildflowers dotted through it. There is something so lovely about over grown lawn with a mowed pathway through it. This is the orchard, overlooking the church.

The abbey itself dates from the 13th Century, and for three centuries belonged to an Augustinian order of nuns before it was bought and transformed into a private home. The cloisters are one of the oldest parts of the building, and the monastic rooms attached to these stunning hallways are largely unchanged since the 13th Century.

The cloisters have been used for backdrops in Harry Potter films as well as the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice. They're beautiful and atmospheric, and so fascinating.

It is quite an imposing building, standing tall and rigid in the landscape. Handsome and grandiose from the outside, it is quite a layered patchwork of styles and eras. One half is even Tudor era, with a classic Tudor layout and inner quadrangle.

Climbing and rambling roses softened the gothic features and added a feminine touch to the abbey facade. The whole structure has a very masculine feel and energy even though it began its life as the spiritual home of nuns.

Inside, the abbey is showing its age. The rooms are grandiose and were once richly furnished. A lot of the contents are beginning to deteriorate, which is such a shame, but the National Trust are doing their utmost to preserve things as much as possible. 

The hand painted wallpaper in one of the rooms of the residential wing is illustrative of how the interior and furnishings of a 13th Century building are inevitably the victims of relentless damp, dust, light and temperature fluctuations. 

Lacock Abbey is famously the birthplace of photography. William Henry Fox Talbot created the oldest still surviving photographic negative in the abbey, his family home. Today visitors can stand at the window that his original negative captured in 1835. 

It is an incredibly diverse building with an equally diverse history to match.

Kate  x

Speckled eggs

After a half day of sunshine (albeit accompanied by some less than June like temperatures) we are back to dreary autumnal like weather today.

Nice weather for ducks, as they say. We have a rather large family of ducks living near us on the brook, and I'd heard whispers of ducklings, but until yesterday hadn't seen them myself. Three ducklings swam past, stopping to forage round the tree branches the wind has blown into the brook in the last few days.

I've become slightly preoccupied with birdlife of late. I think the British DNA is part Twitcher, so it was only a matter of time. Mr & Mrs Robin are officially nesting in our garden wall. He's always so busy; gathering nesting material, bringing food home, and chasing away sparrows. And he is always, always singing. I was told they do that to deter other birds as they're very territorial. On a couple of occasions i've gotten a little too close to the wall and some very worried robin eyes have peered back at me.
I've also finally been able to entice more birds to the garden by hanging a bird feeder. It took a while, but a group of blue tits now feed from it each afternoon around 4.30pm. They're quite noisy, never hold still for long, but they are my favourite British bird.

It has become habit to embrace what sunny moments we have and walk up the road to our neighbour's farm to buy eggs. I particularly love doing this for the views of the countryside, and to see what is blooming in the hedgerows.

Of course the roads are brimming with cow parsley, and buttercups.
There are blackberry flowers. And daisies.

It is becoming a bit of a seasonal nature study. And quite lovely to document. I think i'll continue through the seasons- soon i'll be able to include actual blackberries, then autumn leaves and so on.

These wild violets threw me yesterday. Just a small patch. I can't work out if they're confused by the weather like the rest of us? I thought wild violets were finished for the spring, but perhaps in shady spots they will keep blooming.

And the eggs, the eggs are a thing of beauty themselves. Never uniform in colour, shape, or size. I love them so much more for their nuances. 

Kate  x

Bibury in bloom

Last Friday we met up with my cousin and her family in Bibury for lunch and a stroll around the village. We had been to Bibury before, but it looked a little different when we were there in the depths of winter compared to last week. You can see the iconic cottages of Arlington Row covered in frost HERE. 

The promise of summer was heavy in the air last week, even with the grey sky threatening us with rain. The cottages were awash with rambling roses, gardens were filled with foxgloves, and the River Coln featured a family of swans.

I did lean down to the water to gauge its temperature... still chilly. I am sure the cygnets didn't mind too much, those fluffy down feathers looked quite cosy.

You can get a sense of how popular this walk is by the number of people strolling past the cottages at any given time. It is one of the most iconic places of rural Britain, touted to be one of the most photographed streets in England. Arlington Row even features inside the British passport.

The foxgloves are currently at their peak, growing prolifically in cottage gardens and wild along roadsides alike. I love them and wish some had appeared in our new garden this spring.

This is Matilda. Matilda looooves flowers. That little purse strung over her shoulder was filled with flowers by the time our stroll ended. Roadside weeds, elderflowers from over-hanging trees, valerian sprouting out of walls, foxgloves on cottage doorsteps, Matilda didn't discriminate. Any attempt to teach her that we don't pick flowers from just anywhere was frankly futile. If only I was as brazen as this little five year old. 

I had such a fun time hanging out with my littlest cousins, and they made me laugh so much. Matilda asked me how old I was ("that's so old" she replied), if I liked Harry Styles, and then invited me for a sleepover in her bunkbeds. At one point three-year old Esme was asked to share her pasta with her big sister, to which she replied, "If she wanted pasta she should have ordered it." We couldn't fault her logic, but a conversation about the virtues of sharing was had anyway.

An afternoon with little kids is sometimes the perfect antidote to all the trauma and suffering in this world.

Kate  x

William Morris's country retreat

A couple of weeks ago when we were in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds for a wedding, we stopped by Kelmscott Manor on the drive home. Kelmscott village is a lovely, quiet village surrounded by far-reaching and lush agricultural land. But visitors come to Kelmscott primarily to see the country home of William Morris and his family.

It was such a beautiful late spring day- rain showers and bright sunshine- with a hint of early summer in the air. The manor house is handsome and some of the furnishings are very beautiful (large hangings depicting Morris's much loved Strawberry Thief chintz amongst them), but I really loved the garden the most. Iris, peonies, delphiniums and roses were blooming, showcasing the best that an English cottage garden boasts in early summer.

This is a portrait of Mrs Morris- painted in 1868 by Dante Gabriel Rosetti. It hangs above the family's ornate piano in a downstairs family room. It is much admired for the way the blue silk of her dress catches the light, giving it a luminous quality.

One of the very best items in the home are the bed curtains and pelmet embroidered lovingly by Jane Morris for one of her husband's birthdays. Helped by their daughter Jane, and Lily, the sister of poet W.B Yeats, it is an intricate and beautifully personalised gift. The bed is draped in a delicately embroidered quilt, done after William's death. In the corner of the quilt is a motif you would miss if it wasn't pointed out- Kelmscott Manor itself depicted in embroidery thread. The pelmet is stitched with the words of a poem that William himself wrote called, 'Inscription for an Old Bed.'

More details and image HERE.

The gardens were incredibly lush and full of new season growth. It was easy to get a sense of why the family cherished the property and surrounding countryside so very much.

Kate  x

On the cusp of summer

I feel this week signals the tipping point from spring to summer around here. Though, I might retract this statement when the week-long rain that is forecast for next week arrives.The air is very warm, and it smells of grass and moisture, in the way that early summer always does. 

27 C is our predicted high today. I am making the most of the clear and warm days by drying a few loads of washing, opening all the windows and the French doors, as well as walking barefoot around our courtyard garden to admire the English lavender I just planted. I have plans for lavender ice cream, and almond & lavender cake too. Dining al fresco is on the cards. Lemon-spiked G&Ts are already a regular occurrence. 

The garden is in a little lull- the blossoms and bulbs of spring have long faded- but the summer blooms haven't quite arrived yet. The honeysuckle and climbing rose at the front of the cottage will burst very soon. As will the elderflower tree at the bottom of the garden. I have tall spires putting out as-yet mystery flower heads. I think they'll be larkspur. But they might be delphinium. It's a waiting game.

Mr Red-breasted Robin is giving himself afternoon dust baths below his beloved hawthorn tree. He's rather flighty. I try to photograph him, but he's very shy and much too fast. I'm hoping if I start putting seed out he'll allow me to make friends with him.

In late March I sowed a box of 'mixed blue garden' flower seeds. Who knows what was actually in it, but the seedlings are pushing up at quite a rate now. I'm hoping there will be forget-me-nots and cornflowers in there somewhere. 

Kate  x 

The Courts Garden, Holt

One of the very best things Alex and I have done since moving to England is become members of the National Trust. The Trust is a charity organisation taking on the monumental task of preserving some 500+ homes, gardens, churches, nature reserves and stretches of coastline for now and future generations. I am consistently amazed at the work they do with the money they raise. If you ever get the opportunity to take a preservation tour at one of the properties, I recommend doing it. You will come away with a renewed respect for the task at hand. I did the tour of the Abbey at Lacock this way and I left feeling very proud that my membership contributed to the work, but equally that the membership fee is woefully small for the service the National Trust is providing for the nation and our heritage. 

There is a bit of an assumption that membership is for people of a certain age, ie. retirees with lots of time on their hands. As 20-something-year-olds, we can honestly say that day trips to National Trust properties are some of our favourite days. Lucky for us, we have one or two on our doorstep and many more within easy reach. As I write, we've visited eleven properties in the eight months that we've been living in the UK. 

A couple of weeks ago whilst out furniture shopping we stumbled across The Courts Garden in Holt. It is within easy drive of where we live, but we had intended to visit at a later date because our priority at the time was furnishing the home we now live in. I am so glad we decided to actually visit the garden that day though, because it was such a perfect spring day, and the garden was magical to see in its spring time flush. I had left my good camera at home, thinking we'd just be traipsing around antique and collectables stores and not pretty gardens. Nevertheless, I managed to capture some of the beauty of the seven acres of gardens on my i-phone.

This is the path visitors take when entering the property. The house is a grade II listed 18th Century manor, built from local Bath stone. The manor house is not open to the public as it is still lived in by the owners of the estate. It's beautiful from the outside, and sits in the grounds so wonderfully. It is 'very happily situated', to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bennet. 

At the rear of the manor is a handsome lawn surrounded by hedging and herbaceous borders, from here the garden leads on to other garden rooms, the kitchen garden and eventually the orchard and a three-acre arboretum. 

I really love a good arbour grown using trees. I imagine this is an ornamental pear or similar, but I can't be sure. I wish I'd seen it when it was in full blossom. As it establishes and matures it will be very beautiful. A lot of work, but so timeless.

The apple blossom in the orchard part of the arboretum was really at its peak. I could have happily picnicked underneath it all afternoon. So English, isn't it? 

See how well the house sits in its surroundings? Each yew-hedged garden room is so beautiful in its own right, but collectively the garden has been so well designed. The vista back to the house from numerous points around the property showcase the grandeur of the house and quirkiness of the garden layout.

The site was once home to a 19th Century woollen mill, and apparently some of the features from this industrial past have shaped and dictated how the garden has been constructed- crooked borders, skewed paths etc. The lily pond, above, was brimming with tadpoles.

The Pillar Lawn is a lovely formal space, contrasting well against the relative 'softness' of the neighbouring lily pond and dye pool.

I'll admit, I'd love to poke around inside. Given the exquisiteness of the garden, I imagine the interior is equally impeccable. Perhaps the garden benefits greatly from the house being closed though? Sometimes the money and effort needed to preserve great crumbling country piles means the attached gardens and parklands suffer, but given that this property is still privately occupied maybe means the emphasis is on the garden?

In any case, it is well worth a visit if you love formal gardens. 

Kate  x

Wisteria watch

April 21st

The wisteria was slow to show its pale purple beauty in Castle Combe. It felt as though it really blossomed a good month behind London and the east of England. Some vines in the village are still colouring up now, yet to show their full flush. This particular vine is tucked in on the side of a cottage in the village, its backdrop is a mysterious door to I don't know where...

I thought it would be interesting to photograph this vine as it coloured up and bloomed. It was lovely in all stages, and is currently at its peak.

April 28th

The lovely late evening light has been magical, and lent a warm golden glow to the scene. I think I am really going to love British summer time.

May 7th

Here she is in all her beauty! The scent was just as magical as that enveloping golden hour light on our post-dinner walk. After a long stretch of chilly temperatures, it is nice to thaw out, walk of an evening and watch as the earth comes back to life. It never ceases to amaze me, the seasons ebb and flow in such a remarkable but dependable way.

And on the topic of seasons. I just booked our Christmas break. I know! This post is all about spring and blossom and daylight savings, and yet the seasons march on... I don't want to leave our festive season plans until the last minute again this year. Time and Christmas waits for no man.

I hope my premature Christmas talk doesn't scare you too much.

Kate  x

The law of attraction

I'm not sure I buy into the idea that simply imagining your wants and desires will bring them to fruition in reality.

But weirdly, in a round about sort of way, I think I might have imagined us into this very village we now call home. Or, I might be clutching at straws.

Last year on my birthday, January 12th, Alex took me to dinner at Jamie's Italian and told me his boss wanted him to take on the task of expanding the UK office of the company, and how would I feel about moving to England for a few years. My gut reaction was 50% "I've been waiting my whole life to live in England" and 50% "No! I have just signed up to do my masters degree, moving will make completing it messy and difficult, and I want to just buy a cottage in the Southern Highlands and never have to move again. We've moved enough!"

So, for about a month I said an emphatic, No! But it niggled at me. I was saying no to something I had spent a long time wanting to experience, I just hadn't been brave enough to make happen under my own steam.

A couple of weeks later, sometime in late January, I mindlessly posted this image on my tumblr. Then promptly forgot about it. I had no idea what the image was of, where it might be capturing, or really that it was even somewhere I'd ever want to live. I just liked the image.

Helena Bernald Photography

A gorgeous scene, isn't it?

I was scrolling through my tumblr archive the other week and I was stopped in my tracks when I saw this image. It is in fact the village we now live in. I recognised this view instantly. It is the view we get each and every time we drive into our village. 

Strange, huh?

Here is a photograph of the village, taken by me at golden hour a month or so ago. A different perspective, but equally gorgeous.

We are quite at home with village life. We love wandering along the street to our two local pubs, going for walks in the surrounding woodland, foraging spring greens from the roadsides and undergrowth, and photographing picture postcard perfect scenes, all the while pinching ourselves. 

The law of attraction at work, or just plain coincidence?

I guess that depends on who you ask.

Kate  x

Now, I wonder if that questionable dream I had the other night about me and the Harrison Ford lookalike on a submarine will become reality too? Not sure I'd actually cope very well on a submarine...