I think we’re really moving very swiftly into Spring. So much that the Dwarf Iris Reticulata flowered and finished in five days. I don’t think I will bother with them again – a floral disappointment.
But onto better things and my Six on Saturday:
I haven’t been around for awhile. It’s not that I haven’t been in the gardens, not at all. It’s just that my writerly work requires long hours at the screen and I couldn’t face blogging. It’s also difficult to load things where we live on the coast, as our internet has slowed dramatically and mostly, I have to work off my phone. But happy with progress on the latest manuscript, and with a hot chocolate drink seasoned with marshmallows and Lindt chocolate shavings, I feel revived enough to post about the gardens.
I’m excited to announce that the anthology, Sword and Sirventes, has just been released as an e-book. The paperback version will be released in the next fortnight.
Very quick SoS today.
We’re in the city for a few days and the weather is astonishing – twenty degrees and the garden is so confused. And dry…
We’re back in our big garden on the coast after dallying in the city last week and I was happy to see the garden breathing again as temperatures drop and the nights have welcome dews. This garden suffers in summer, as I’ve mentioned before, and in order to try and create a more temperate micro-climate, we’ve slowly been filling the old orchard with trees of all sorts. Hopefully they’ll act as not just wind protection, but feedlots for birds and insects AND lower the overall summer temperature of the whole garden. Trouble is, it may not be in my life time. But that’s gardening, isn’t it? A measure of future-proofing?
I appear not to have written a post on my reading since September last year! And that, my friends, is not a good thing.
In September of 2020, I remember saying it might be good, with my birthday and Christmas approaching, to receive book vouchers for my favourite stores. But no, it was not to be.
Instead, but just as appreciated, I received garden-nursery vouchers, which I have started to use this last week. Gardening for me is as much a passion as reading.
But also, summer came and I try never to go near the city during summer – a waste of my time, so I stay happily ensconced in our coastal garden by the sea. Which of course makes my Kindle and the all-important Amazon and Audible bookshops vital. Here, by the sea, where I can hear the waves and watch the seabirds, I have no need to drive into the city, park the car, walk through crowds to get to a bookshop. It’s all done with the click of fingers and buttons.
It’s been an age since I contributed to SoS, despite that I’ve always visited all the other gardens across the globe. Life’s been a bit busy and to be honest, it’s that time of year where nothing much is going on in our gardens.
A writer can’t spend all day in purdah. Although given 2020-21, Lockdown does resemble a kind of solitary confinement. But even in Lockdown, we have all been entitled to our ‘outside time’.
And so it is for me.
