Tag: bird box

Modelling Daphne’s Dress

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My 75th birthday was very pleasurable. Matthew, Tess, and Poppy woke up here in the morning, and Shelley and Ron,  Becky and Ian visited in the afternoon. We all sat in the garden after lunch.

Poppy 1Poppy 2

The first present I opened was from Poppy, who had chosen it. A certain amount of self-interest was rapidly confirmed.

Mat and Tess 1

Our granddaughter provided her parents with their own party hats.

Poppy 3Poppy 4Tess and Poppy 3

Matthew obligingly assembled a colourful bird house that Louisa and Errol had sent me. Poppy saw it as a handbag and commandeered it for a tour of the garden she undertook with Tess;

Poppy and poppy

she was intrigued to be introduced to one of her floral namesakes,

Tess and Poppy 1

and to many other blooms,

Tess and Poppy 2

with some of which she picked and adorned herself.

Kitchen Bed

This was one view of the Kitchen Bed,

Garden view across Margery's Bed

and another seen across Margery’s Bed, each containing

Day lilies 1Day lilies 2

a number of day lilies, some of which Jackie dug up for Tess along with several other plants.

Garden view from Heligan Path bench

This scene is beyond the Heligan Path bench.

New Zealand flax

Being a Kiwi, Tess was able to describe exactly how to propagate New Zealand flax, and to explain the haka.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiKFYTFJ_kw&w=560&h=315]

Pigeons on roof 1Pigeons on roof 2Pigeons on roof 3Pigeons on roof 4Pigeons on roof 5

The reason for this was that I understand that this war dance also represents other events such as courtship, and I had no idea whether the capers of the pigeons on our roof represented war or love.

Poppy 5Poppy 6Poppy 7

Becky brought over a beautifully hand stitched and embroidered dress that her niece Poppy had left behind at her home. Poppy couldn’t wait to strip off and model it. This treasured possession had been made by Tess’s friend, Daphne Harris.

This evening, except for Shelly and Ron who had left earlier, we are all going to dine at Lal Quilla. Regular readers will understand that that means I will enjoy a hot curry and drink Kingfisher, and at the end of the meal will be past caring what anyone else consumed. Should anything out of the ordinary occur, I will report on that tomorrow.

Bamboo, Brambles, And Ballerina

For the time being at least, the crow has conceded defeat and alternates with the wood pigeons in patrolling the area beneath the bird feeder and picking up scraps, of which there are plenty, because the smaller birds aren’t all that tidy.

The finial of the new arch has opened into a rich apricot coloured rose with a hole in one petal. Given the treatment it has had, one little blemish is less than could have been expected.

I set about the bamboo immediately this morning. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the roots tunnelled under the gravel to the other side of the path, and were rather rampant in the oval bed. I wanted to save the parent clump which is quite attractive, and really just needs managing. I reduced it somewhat. Having to clamber over the other plants in order to remove the bamboo, there were bound to be some accidents.

The head of one of the Pink Abundance roses was dislodged from its stem, so warranted its own accident saucer.
It hadn’t been my intention to do much weeding of the bed, still less to those further back or to the right of the path. By the time, however, I had taken out the the bamboo, and the bramble that was choking the life out of anything in the other beds, I had done quite a bit. The brambles at this end of the garden seem to emanate from that behind ours.

I broke the back of the task of renovating this path, but downed tools before breaking mine. Hopefully I will finish the job tomorrow.

Beyond the right hand rock boundary of this walkway one can just glimpse a raised stone walled bed which had been completely hidden by the brambles.
Jackie continued to blaze a trail into the kitchen garden.

The ballerina rose seen dancing around the red bird box, was invisible last week.

Bay trees seem to have self-seeded and grown quite big all over the garden. We each encountered a couple that had to go. They have a cunning system of taking root between those of a more mature tree, so all we could actually do was cut them down. It seems a great shame to remove such a plant, but there really are too many in the wrong places.
Whilst we dined this evening on Jackie’s sausage casserole (recipe) with new potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, we watched, through the kitchen window, a pair of woodpeckers enjoying their meal on our bird feeder. Jackie drank Emilia lambrusco 2012. My wine was Baturrica tarragona gran reserva 2007. It seems that we, too, were being observed from outside by a little potted fir tree.