kiwi – derrickjknight

The Flyer

On another springlike, sunny, morning, beside a pot of primulas, Jackie began work on renovating her recent dump table purchase. This involved glue and screws.

Hoverflies are back in town. Can you spot this one? (Yellow attracts)

This is a view across the eastern end of the Heligan Path towards the Rose Garden.

These hellebores are different from those in the above scene, and blend well with some little star-shaped bulbed plants, that we haven’t identified. (I am grateful for suggestions on this question. See the definitive comment from the biking gardener below)

The kiwi communes with the pheasant by the eucalyptus shadows.

Later in the morning, Paul came over, bringing printing paper, final drafts of the exhibition flyer, support, encouragement, guidance, and assistance with the printing process. Jackie produced an excellent ham and vegetable soup for lunch.

After the break, Paul and I worked well into the afternoon, and he went home with the first sixty copies. I continued after he had left.

Our friend’s superb design has created a two-sided document that can be folded to provide an informative little brochure.

The picture of Jackie picking daffodils finishes up on the front, with the map on the back.

Further information on us and the other exhibitors appears within the folds.

I just do the printing. Margery and Paul do the origami.

This evening we relished dining on Jackie’s choice chilli con carne and mushroom rice, followed by Tesco’s yellow ticket chocolate eclairs. I drank El Sottino, a Spanish red wine Ian brought at Christmas, and Jackie drank sparkling water.

The Unidentified Fir Bed

I began the day by watching a recording of the England v. Australia match in the Rugby World Cup. In case there is any rugby fan in either hemisphere who is yet to watch it, I will say no more.

Encouraged by yet another warm, sunny, day, Jackie began work on clearing, and settling down for winter, the bed between the Heligan and Phantom Paths. We will call it The Unidentified Fir Bed, in honour of the large evergreen that enhances it. My contribution was to gather up and shift the debris to the respective compost and combustible heaps; to dig out a tree peony that encroached upon the Heligan Path; and to rake up fallen leaves from the gravel.

In addition to releasing a number of choked plants that had not seen the light of day for a year or two, Jackie discovered another row of large rocks, and a length of perished buried hose from an ancient irrigation system.

This afternoon, deciding to dig over the exposed ground, she found much rubble therein. I, oblivious of this added difficulty, watched TV rugby matches between Argentina and Tonga, and between Ireland and Italy.

Elsewhere in the garden this morning I had discovered yet another owl perched on a stump,

and the aerator acquired from the dump yesterday piercing the grass patch. The pheasant and kiwi didn’t look impressed.

One of Margery’s hollyhocks still stands sentinel to the left of this scene.

Today’s bouquet of roses includes

Laura Ford,

Festive Jewel,

and Absolutely Fabulous.

Butterflies like this well camouflaged Speckled Wood (thanks to Paul Clarke for pointing out that this is not a Wall Brown) have not yet given up,

neither have the slurping bees.

This evening we dined on cod in mornay sauce with broccoli florets; and crisp carrots, cauliflower and cabbage. We both drank Cimarosa Pedro Jimenez 2014.

Embellishments

This morning was wasted trying to access e-mails. Just two days after BT changed their system, possibly indicating a parting from Yahoo, I could log on to BT but not to my e-mails. After wrestling with the problem for far too long, I eventually gave up and phoned their help line. This was clearly inundated with similar issues. Having forged my way through the machine response, I had to wait half an hour to reach a real live, and very helpful, individual, who took over my screen and grappled with it for another half hour before acknowledging that BT had suffered an ‘outage’ which they were working on. I should be able to access my e-mails within 24 hours. When the system was changed I had to provide a new password. Today I had to produce another. Don’t they realise old fogeys have memory problems?
In the last few days, whilst I have been gallivanting, Jackie has, among numerous other tasks in the garden, virtually cleared the skip pile and completely eradicated the extraneous foliage from the back fence;

embellished the area with hanging baskets; chopped up most of the branches into suitably sized pieces for the pyre; and transferred them to the site for burning. After I had posted yesterday’s entry, I completed this latter task.

I look forward to the new embellishments developing into the maturity of those Jackie planted earlier.

The Kiwi sculpture Michael and Heidi gave me for my birthday now perches alongside the patio.
This evening we dined at our neighbours The Royal Oak. I enjoyed my ham, eggs, chips and peas, as did Jackie her chicken wrapped in bacon and cheese. Her sweet was chocolate fudge cake and ice cream. My choice was apple crumble and custard. She drank Becks, while I drank Doom Bar.