A whole month

I don't believe I have a proper excuse.  I had to go back to France to see to the house and that was a problem, a hurdle that seemed to grow larger with each day that passed.  In the event, it wasn't as distressing as I expected, I think because the house has happy memories going back all the 10 years since we first looked at the ruin it then was and decided it was our dream home.

French inheritance laws are a nightmare so I set off with every certificate I have ever owned up to and including the cat's vaccination certificates.  I'm not sure why those came too, because he didn't accompany me on this trip, but you just never know. However it all became unnecessary when we discovered that the notaire (lawyer) who drew up the original purchase documents decided, I assume, he's help me out by giving ownership to our sons.  How he managed to do this without feeling the need to let us know, I'm not at all sure.

So there I am, over there to put the house up for sale and it turns out I have no house to sell.  This has required a massive rethink. 

The indecision hasn't been helped by the beautiful warm sunny spring weather we had over there.  The garden and river looked especially good.

Can I really leave all that behind?

Though driving through Paris on the way home could have changed all those thoughts.  First the traffic jams (of a continuous nature):

and then the startling sight of a shanty town on the city's outskirts.

They don't advertise the "bidonvilles" in the tourist guides.  Seeing this make me count my blessings.

Adding (a glimpse of me)

I thought I would return to photo hunting in the new year of 2013 - but not this week.  I didn't think I had anything to fit the themes.  I never include myself in photos but then I came across some that included a glimpse.

Some gardens and parks add art, presumably to enhance the view. Sometimes they do, and this sculpture I thought did fit in fairly well, at the Salutation Gardens. 

At times I'm guilty myself of trying to enhance nature and this sunset is one example of using an added boost of colour.  The original must have been good enough for me to have taken the picture but when I viewed it on the computer I did think it needed an extra something.

 

I am also guilty of adding a little glimpse of myself, most frequently shadow.  I can't think what I thought this would show but my excuse is that it was the hottest day of summer, the one hot day of last summer (25 July) and it must have gone to my head.

On that same day I managed to produce what used to be a common occurrence, the finger across the lens.  It's almost impossible with my own camera but I must have decided to take my husband's camera that day.  It was a long walk in the sun and a smaller camera seemed sensible. 

 

In spite of all the artificial additions, I really prefer nature's own.  As far as I'm concerned, these wild flowers added more interest than any shadow or finger of mine.

A two-in-one post for the Photo Hunts. 

Salutation Gardens

I've been seeing signposts pointing to somewhere called Salutation Gardens for a few years now and only vaguely wondered what and where that was.  It sounds to me either like some sort of memorial garden or the gardens of a pub.

I finally looked it up and found that it's in sandwich, on Knightrider Road.  Knightrider?  Is it a joke?    But no, road names are like that in Sandwich.  Past Breezy Corner and just before you get to Hogs Corner you reach the Salutation Gardens.

Strictly speaking it is called the Secret Gardens of Sandwich.  They are the restored gardens of  Lutyens mansion called Salutation.  The mansion was built during 1911-12 and the gardens were designed in the style of Gertrude Jekyll.

Edwin Lutyens was a British architect who designed a large number of English country houses.  He met the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll when he was working on his first commission and that was the start of a long partnership between them.

Jekyll designed gardens, about 400 of them, full of herbaceous borders, a more natural effect than the more formal geometric Victorian garden fashionable until then.  They were designed to have "unexpected views and pictorial surprises". 

Well, the gardens were a surprise to me.  This is right in the middle of Sandwich, behind high walls.  I had no idea anything like this existed there.  A 3.5 acre oasis of greenery with colours as an added extra.

The way in.

The house is now used for bed and breakfast accommodation.

The white garden which was once used as a herb garden.  It still has little hedges around the beds and I'm happy to see they are no tidier than mine.

The yellow garden. This was the yellowest part.  Much of the rest verged on orange and even red but maybe it's yellower in the spring time.

This is the sort of vegetable garden I always dreamt of in the days when I had such a thing.  It never looked like this but I didn't have 4 gardeners.

I did have rabbits but they didn't take their guard duties as seriously.

Extended shelf life pumpkins, the best sort to grow.

A very pretty place and well worth spending a couple of hours there.  And yes, it does have a tea-room and they do sell good cakes.

The return of Kevin

In 2007 we had black redstarts nesting and they produced Kevin the teenager, above.  I've seen them in the garden several years since but this year they seemed to have built a nest in the same place as before, in a small open porch which had an old ventilation opening.

Given that it's 7 years ago and black restarts appear to have a lifespan of up to 8 years, Kevin may well be one of the pair or even one of them could be his offspring.  I have been doing little over the last few days other than trying to hide from view with a camera.

The nest is up there but I can't quite reach, but it does seem a little rudimentary and insubstantial.  I tried holding the camera way above my head and I still can't reach.  I don't want to disturb them with any ladder climbing at this stage.

I thought they might be very late hatching, early July seems late, but looking at the dates I took photos before, it's more or less the same.


I had a better view in 2007 but I forget how I did it.

The male black redstart.  Note the stylish plastic bird feeder hanging from the railings.

The female black restart, looking like a long-legged robin, just leaving the nest to go off in search of food .

And she returned with a good one.  The male did find a dragonfly but of course by the time the camera was focused, he was gone. The one that got away.

Apart from these pictures strictly for the birds, I spent the day counting raindrops.

Not quite self-sufficiency

This year has been the most amazing year for fruit.  With absolutely no attention from me, my little garden has produced a super-abundance.

The tomato plants ran riot, not so much climbing as crawling, but still giving me more fruit than I can eat.  Tomato soup recipes are being consulted daily. 

The grapes came early but there were plenty for the birds.  There's supposed to be a black grape vine too but it may have been overwhelmed by the green.  Their primary purpose is to provide shade for the sitting out area so I shouldn't complain.

The pears have been as good as they always are.  I have no idea what to do to keep them in good order, so they look after themselves and make a good job of it.  I won't interfere.

And this little fellow comes harvesting daily.  Usually he's too fast for me but I managed to get a couple of pictures, blurry but...

At the moment he's more interested in the neighbour's walnut tree.  The walnuts are as big as his head but he still manages to run like the wind carrying one in his mouth.  I think he was planning to hide it in my garden until he thought I was paying too much attention.  So off he ran.

It's raining leaves

It's that time of year again when our neighbour's tree  torments us.

x
The leaves are very small and light and get everywhere.  I suppose technically, they should be called leaflets because the leaf itself is a compound leaf. They fill the gutters, not only on the roof but the road too.

They land on every available surface

This year we haven't been blessed with many of the giant seed pods.  I think it exhausted itself after last year's efforts.  Nevertheless there are pods and they are sprouting.  These are probably from last year.
 

They've fallen on stony ground.  I really hope they know what that means.

I looked up some facts about this tree after various people left me comments to help me identify it.  According to Wikipedia, it's Gleditsia triacanthos or Honey Locust native to eastern North America.  Ha!  So Christopher Columbus is to blame!  It can reach heights of up to 30m (almost 100ft) but I think it's reached that already.

My spirits lifted when I read that it's relatively short-lived, especially given that it's fully grown.  However they were dashed again when I saw that short-lived for a tree means 150 years.  I can't wait that long!

Attack of the giant seed pods

We've been away from France a maximum of three weeks but in that time the garden has been occupied by giant seed pods.  They were covering the whole area, all from our (charming) neighbour's trees.  I say charming because he did apologise for his tree before we moved in - I had no idea what he meant.

These are GIANT seed pods.

How long is that?  18 inches?  45 cm or thereabouts?   Three sacks full today and still more biding their time up on the tree.  It's not so much the pods themselves because they are relatively easy to clear away, but miss one at your peril.  The seeds germinate easily and produce seedlings with the most vicious thorns imaginable, and roots that are determined not to let go.

I think it may be an acacia, but when I tried to look it up, it turns out there are something like 1300 varieties of acacia, many of which have been reclassified as other things since 2005, and others aren't acacias at all but false acacias.  My investigative instincts failed me at this point and I returned outside to gather more pods....

Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's nose went sniffle, sniffle, snuffle, and her eyes went twinkle, twinkle.

Seen the other night.  No doubt she was after the snail that got away.  Please note the green, green, grass of home.  The result of the rainiest summer EVER.


The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle on Project Gutenberg

After the rain

We've had a great deal of rain this week, in fact for most of the summer. I haven't been able to get outside with my camera very much at all.

Hypericum with raindrops and berries.

Oxalis, also known as the Good Luck plant

 

Welsh poppy 

Mr Toad, still sheltering from the rain and....

....his next meal beating a hasty retreat.