The gardener stirs from her winter slumbers

What a lovely day we had yesterday in West London. The sun shone, the sky was blue, the temperatures were mild and, all of a sudden, it felt positively spring-like, which was a bit mad given how the day before we’d been hiding indoors from hailstones the size of Mint Imperials.

Anyway, I have a confession to make: I’m still a country girl at heart. I grew up in the beautiful rolling hills of South Tyrone, and every spring-time, when the sap starts rising in the hedgerows, I get a rush of something primitive in my veins that drives me out into the garden.

I know. I know. ‘Steady on, it’s only the middle of January,’ I hear you say, but yesterday’s burst of primal enthusiasm produced enough momentum to turn the pot of gloom that resides in my front porch into a pot of something approaching welcome cheer.

The problem is, at this time of the year, the garden centres and plant sellers don’t have much to offer in the way of plants for creating pots of welcome cheer. All the red and white Christmas cyclamens and berry-laden plants have gone, and there’s not a whole load of anything colourful left behind to use until the spring bulbs make their debut.

In the end I got some sweet little matching/ clashing garden primroses from the flower stall just outside Sainsbury’s in West Ealing. I’m very keen on matching/ clashing pinks, reds and oranges at the moment. But the resulting ensemble is only OK rather than eye-catching. I’ll blame the lack of choice for my failure to deliver pizzazz, and move on quickly without a photograph.

On our mini-plant hunt Maxi and I trawled through the Osterley Park, Wyevale (dog-friendly – hip hip hooray!) garden centre, where they have quite a decent half-price sale on pretty nearly all of their outdoor plants. We came home with this little trove: a blackcurrant bush, a loganberry bush, a white clematis that promises to have attractive coppery leaves, a buddleia bush that promises to attract swarms of butterflies in summer, a bag of seed potatoes, a tray of curly kale plants and some seeds for salad greens.

I’m looking forward to making preserves with the loganberries and blackcurrants.  I’m already imagining a rich blackcurrant jam, delicately flavoured with star anise and a hint of vanilla … . Hopefully they won’t wither and die in the meantime, or chose to do all their fruiting when I’m on my summer holidays!

We’ve already planted the white clematis to grow through the (rather bare) under parts of an old climbing rose that’s gone a bit leggy at the front of our house. With any luck it will do a good job of hiding the ‘bald’ bits.

Every year I get a few seed potatoes and plant them in patio containers to harvest in June/ July. It's like some kind of earth-magic how they multiply and grow in the soil when no one's looking. You see, you can take the girl out of Ireland, but you can’t take the Irish potato-mania out of the girl!

My garden isn't huge, but it's big enough for me to grow a few crops of this and that for the kitchen, which I find hugely satisfying. I love to be outside surrounded by greenery and birdsong. It's such a great stress-buster, and I've noticed that Emilio, my eight year-old son, gets a bit of a buzz out of it as well.

I've just learnt on my travels about the 'Edible Garden Show', a not-to-be-missed event that's taking place at Alexandra Palace from 28th to 30th March.

'Perfectly timed for the beginning of the growing season, the show is buzzing with tips on keeping bees, raising chickens, brewing beer, saving energy, mouth-watering baking and dishing up delicious meals using home-grown ingredients,' according to the website.

Sounds good to me!

You can check it out for yourself here: Edible Garden Show

Anyway, happy gardening, and maybe I'll see you at Ally Pally come March!

Bonny x

Puppy Angel

Do you believe in angels?

I  do. They walk amongst us every day. They come in all shapes and sizes, and they have a tendency to show up and help us out when we least expect them to.

A little furry angel recently entered my life. He's a puppy, and is just the gentlest, sweetest little person you could ever hope to meet. Forgive me, but when I talk about my dog, ‘he’ can never be an ‘it’. His name is Maxi, as in Maximus, even though he’s really a bit of a Minimus, standing the height of a decent bottle of red to the top of his curly brow.

The idea was that he would be my son’s dog. And my son loves him, and truly believes that he is his dog. At night they even snuggle down and go to sleep together, but you know, on the quiet, he’s really my dog.

All day long, he’s there by my side. I type away, and he snoozes on his beanbag, chews on random objects - my slippers/ bookcase (bizarre)/ the leg of my desk or plays with his toys as we listen to playlists on Spotify.

When it’s time to do the school run I pull on my boots and we take a detour through the park. I’ve never been much of a Gym Bunny, but I’m always up for a walk in the fresh air, even when we have a grey West London drizzle. It’s great. He chases around, barks at the big dogs and then runs behind me for safety when they bark back. As angels go, he's definitely one of the cheekier ones.

Maxi fills my days with fun and affection, and he has slowly reinforced my faith in humanity. You know that people aren’t that bad when they can't help but smile with delight at a cute puppy romping along the pavement. And the number of folk who want to stop for a chat … ‘How old is he?’ … ‘What’s his name?’ … is unbelievable. All that big city reserve just melts away.

So here’s to you Maxi, my very own little household angel.

Bonny x

Cemeteries ...

I love old cemeteries... .

There’s something about the legion of untold stories that the headstones represent: a silent multitude who have lived and breathed, loved and lost, laughed and cried, in pretty much the same way as we do all of those things today.

Sometimes their stories are hinted at: ‘Precious Daughter’, ‘Beloved Wife and Mother’, ‘Killed in the service of his country’.

But it gets you thinking, doesn’t it? What were they like? How were they mourned? What happened to them?

I’m especially intrigued and touched by those sad little graves that lie just beyond the limit of the consecrated plot. What sin, real of imagined, denied them a decent burial?

One of my favourite churchyards is to be found in Old Chiswick. If you go to Saint Nicholas' Church just on the river-side of the Hogarth roundabout you will find it all there in abundance: a library of forgotten lives.

There’s the grand memorial of William Hogarth (I am a HUGE fan of William Hogarth) with it’s wonderful dedication by his old chum David Garrick:

“Farewell great Painter of Mankind

Who reach’d the noblest point of Art,

Whose pictur’d Morals charm the Mind

And through the eye correct the Heart.”

“If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay

If Nature touch thee, drop a tear:

If neither move thee, turn away

For HOGARTH’S honour’d dust lies here.”

And then there are the folk that no one knows much about like little Nellie, who departed this life January 16^th , 1873 aged only 7 years' old. As a mother, I get a bit emotional when I hang around little Nellie's grave. Poor lamb, may she rest in peace.

To one side of the path that skirts the churchyard there’s this wonderful old garden door, all dark and mysterious. I wonder whether any smugglers or body snatchers or other ne'er-do- wells ever slunk behind it to escape the long arm of the law.

Anyway, I fiddled around with my photo, and turned it into this:

Ta-dah! What do you think? Would it make a good book-jacket cover for a mystery novel?

If you fancy taking a wander down in that direction, you can find out about the Church of St Nicholas here: St Nicholas' Church, Chiswick

Bonny x

just hooking, reading and doing my thing ...

Shush … don’t tell anyone, but I secretly like to crochet (and knit and sew).

It’s one of my guilty pleasures. Guilty? I don’t know, but it just never seemed to be intellectual/ artistic/ interesting enough to talk about. What kind of sad hausfrau would I appear to be if I arrived with my yarn bag under one arm? So my lovely double knitting, super soft cashmerino and multi-coloured four ply all stayed hidden at home.

And then, little by little, people seem to have rediscovered the pleasure of quietly creating something unique in a palette of colour that pleases their eye. Stitch by stitch it’s become respectable, therapeutic, trendy even, to crochet and knit again. Groups have grown up of like-minded people who want to get together for a knit and a natter.

Perfect! How lovely! Now I can take my needles out of the closet and practise my passion in public.

I’ve often wondered whether someone like Tracy Chevalier shared my secret enthusiasm? Have you read, ‘The Last Runaway’, her latest book? It’s about an English Quaker girl, who emigrates to America and gets involved in rescuing escaped slaves as part of the Underground Railway movement. One of the many charming things about the tale is the way Tracy describes the lead character’s love of quilting. Either she has done her homework very thoroughly, and then used a lot of empathy/ imagining to get it spot on, or she’s done some sewing in between times.

I especially loved the way bits of fabric, from a loved one’s cast-off dress/ tablecloth/whatever, would be stashed away, and later incorporated into a quilt, and a memory would get stitched into a practical, intimate, everyday object that would become a very physical connection with the past. That’s got to be the ultimate up-cycle!

Anyway if you haven’t’ read it, and especially if you enjoyed ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’, in which she did a great job of recreating the workshop of the fifteenth century tapestry weavers in Paris, go get yourself a copy. It’s a delightful read.

Enjoy!

Bonny x