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Serena Trowbridge's avatarDr Serena Trowbridge

IMG_1280While I tend to find a bit of Gothic in everything, sometimes it stares you in the face, and onIMG_1288 a recent visit to the landscape gardens at Stowe I felt as though I was walking back into the eighteenth century. The grounds are run by the National Trust, while Stowe School occupies the house and surrounding buildings. From the 1730s Stowe was renowned for its gardens, with visitors coming from all over the world to see them, but in the 1740s ‘Capability’ Brown, at the beginning of his career, was appointed to redesign the grounds, and though some of the original features (such as the temple) were kept, the more formal aspects of the garden vanished, with the idea of ‘landscape’ taking over.

Viscount Cobham, the man responsible for taking on the young Brown to reshape his gardens, was part of the beginning of a revolution in taste, of…

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Red_autumn_leaves

‘Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.’

Albert Camus

Autumn Walks

CaptureTake a look at this wonderful ‘Walking Map’ to find some great autumn walks in the UK!

kind-of-herbs‘Herbs are used for two purposes:

a. to add a flavour that isn’t there but should have been;

b. to take away a flavour that is there that shouldn’t be.’

William Rushton ‘The Alternative Gardener’ (1986).

David Bryson reviews this book on Amazon and in it he says :

‘It is quite a few years now since Willie Rushton died from a heart attack, aged barely 60. He had been a prominent figure among the British satirists of the 1960’s, appearing on the BBC shows That Was the Week That Was and Not So Much a Programme. He also contributed in a major way to Private Eye in its effervescent early manner, and continued to grace it with occasional cartoons more or less until his death. He was an exceptionally gifted artist, with a distinctive and unmistakable style, and it is a great and sentimental pleasure to find so much of his drawing in this amusing little volume. As a humorist he was quirky, sometimes a little bit mechanical and indeed occasionally downright unintelligible, but at his best very funny indeed, again in his own very personal way. To my own dying day I shall treasure the memory of a cartoon following outrage among the Conservative government in 1964 that Harold Wilson, then leader of the opposition, had stepped in and settled a strike without saying by your leave or with your leave to the government. Rushton depicted an elderly newspaper vendor in a muffler and cloth cap handing a customer the Evening Standard bearing the headline WILSON ACTING AS IF HE IS PRIME MINISTER. To this Rushton’s old newspaper-seller added `More than you could say for some.’

Old School Gardener

Pallet to Bench

pallet garden bench

This looks like a simple and strong creation using wooden pallets – and some other timber?

Old School Gardener

LogoGardenParty2-1My fourth offering from a book I bought in a charity shop recently…..

Rain-making recipes:

1. Get the lawnmower out.

2. Water the garden.

3. Light the barbeque.

4.Throw a garden party.

Dry-up spells:

1. Go abroad for a holiday.

2. Decorate the lounge.

3.Plant out seedlings.

4. Seed the lawn.

lawn seed

From : ‘Mrs. Murphy’s Laws of Gardening’ – Faith Hines (Temple House books, 1992)

Old School Gardener

 

wall plant art

Old School Gardener

My old friend Richard has built himself a great little shed from pallet and other ‘skip wood’. Here it is, along with a picture of his allotment in Bristol. Just shows what you can do with a recycling turn of mind!

Old School Gardener

kale-at-the-chateau-villandry

Kale at the Chateau- Villandry

Pew Tor- an old friend
Pew Tor- an old friend

Our final walk. We returned to an old favourite, Pew Tor, just a short drive from Tavistock. It has a wonderful rock formation, remiding me of a dog’s head (see the picture above). It’s an old favourite because this walk has become bit of an institution in our family. We have done it many times with our children at various times in the past. Perhaps the most memorable occasion was when our, then young, son raced back down the slope with the call ‘running down the mountain, with some shouting!’

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The walk today, another sunny afternoon, was easy. On previous occasions it has been a bit of a puff, but I guess our training on the previous five days was enough to make it a breeze. But this time something else was different. On previous occasions I’d looked around at the views and not known many, if any of the other tors and land in view.

But today, this felt like my space– I don’t know if it was the euphoria of having walked 20 tors in six days, or more the fact that I could look around, name the tors we could see, and more significantly, say we went there on…..

Water action has created a pool in one of the Tor's top stones

Water action has created a pool in one of the Tor’s top stones

We’ll be back- maybe for another 20 of the 160 plus tors, so that we can gradually come to know this wonderful moor even better.

Old School Gardener

 

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