Coldharbour Mill: a little piece of knitting history ...

The other day I popped by a wool spinning mill with more history than you could shake a stick at. The Coldharbour Mill in Uffculme, Devon (just beside junction 27 on the M5) is a little chunk of the West Country's industrial heritage. It's been doing its thing, spinning wool from raw fleeces, for more than 200 years. At first it was powered by a huge water wheel, then they upgraded to steam. These days they mostly run on mains electricity, but on certain days of the year they fire up their huge beam engine and return to the age of steam once again.

Coldharbour Mill, Uffculme, Devon

How to waterproof your seed drill labels ...

The other day I was mooching around a rather fabulous garden, where they had everything organised and cared for to a level that I can only aspire to. I happened upon these seed drills where they'd recycled some used water bottles to water-proof their drill labels. It's such a simple but effective idea.

Attach your label to a stick, and then house it in an upturned plastic bottle, and the rain's not going to wash away your ink: genius!

All the best for now,

Bonny x

The Lost Gardens of Heligan in high summer ...

The last time we visited the Lost Gardens was in the springtime. They were divine. The apple trees, the bluebells and the wild garlic were blooming and the rhododendrons had just passed their best and were dropping great carpets of cerise petals on the ground.  Last week we returned to see them at the height of their summer glory. And, whilst they were very different from how they'd looked in the springtime, they delighted us with displays of ripening fruit, larder-filling vegetable drills and happy farmyard animals hanging out down by the orchards.

I've got nothing against the great Renaissance gardens or the celebrated English Landscape Movement that set out with the single objective of being pretty. All of that stuff rocks, but what really makes my heart sing is a beautiful, practical garden that's full of things I could feed my family with. And that is where these gardens come into their own. Yes, they're pretty. Yes, they please the eye. Yes, they tick all the boxes on the aesthetic check list that add up to good design. But the highest compliment that I can pay them is to say that they, quite literally, look good enough to eat.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall

Happiness is a butterfly,

which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp,

Barley field in the moonlight ...

... and there's nothing to beat a moonlit stroll through a waving field of barley on a mild night in July.

Sweet dreams,

Bonny x