lilies – Page 6 – derrickjknight

Hordle Scarecrow Trail

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This morning we visited New Milton, for a shop at Lidl; for me to have a haircut at Hair Design opposite; and to pay some cheques into the bank, although there’s hardly any point in the current economic climate.

Following the amount of interest expressed in yesterday’s scarecrow photographs, we investigated further. The competition is judged by visitors, like us, who bought a list of entrants with space for voting on three categories: Child, Individual, and Business. There is no prize, but subscriptions go towards the September fete. The theme is Children’s Stories. The pictures taken yesterday are of children’s creations. Today we visited a few more, including

Jun(ior) 3 ‘Red Riding Hood’, at 29, Sky End Lane;

IND(ividual) 14 ‘Ugly Duckly’ at 49, Ashley Lane;

and Businesses 11 ‘Tinkerbell’ at Hordle Post Office, 14 Everton Road;

13 ‘Little Red Riding Hoodie’ at Hordle Pharmacy;

16 ‘Mr Wolf Little Red Riding Hood’ at Everything Pets in Stopples Lane;

17 ‘Alice in Hordle Land’ at Classic Cuts alongside the pet shop;

and 18 ‘Wanna bite, Snow White’ next door at Co-op Stores.

Back at home, the sunlight played on front garden plants

hibiscus,

and some rather splendid lilies.

Shelly visited this afternoon and wandered around the garden with her sister.

The Raj in Old Milton is the third reincarnation in our time of the restaurant that was The Jarna when we first arrived in April 2014, then Spice of India until six months ago. We tried it this evening, and found it to be good. My choice of main course was king prawn naga. Jackie and I shared a naan, pilau rice, and tarka dal. She drank Kingfisher and I drank Cobra.

Gardening With A Camera

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Photographing while gardening is a hazardous business. I blame the camera’s unforgiving eye. My entertainment this morning was tidying up the Rose Garden with dead-heading and sweeping back into the beds the mulch bark that our avian friends daily toss onto the paving; and clearing up the Head Gardener’s clipping piles.

I was at risk of exposing bits I’d missed, like these few scraps of bark in this shot of crocosmia torches burning alongside the Rose Garden path;

revealing tasks I hadn’t yet carried out, like the clippings in this view through the gazebo;

or incurring the displeasure of the Head Gardener for leaving a blue bucket in this view from the circular concrete of what we think is the site of an old well.

This afternoon we continued with our usual garden maintenance activities, mine, of course, including the new camera, with which I am beginning to capture elusive insects in flight.

Small White butterflies are never still;

and bees, like this one aiming for a crocosmia, are apt to dart from one plant to another.

Included among the many varieties of fuchsia we have

Chequerboard,

Hawkshead,

and Army Nurse, this one sharing an urn with trailing lobelia.

There is also variety in the Rose Garden, provided by different types of flower, such as lilies, geraniums, petunias, penstemons, heucheras and honeysuckle, in addition to the crocosmias mentioned earlier.

Crême de la crême,

and Winchester Cathedral are among the white scented varieties of rose;

Mamma Mia is here reflected in one of the mirrors placed for that purpose.

This evening we dined at Lymington’s Lal Qilla, where, despite their being very crowded, we received our usual warm welcome, friendly, efficient service, and excellent food. My choice was king prawn Ceylon; Jackie’s was chicken sag; and we shared mushroom rice, egg paratha, and Tarka dal. We both drank Kingfisher.

With the promise of an interesting sunset on our return, we diverted to Milford on Sea. In the second shot the sky is reflected in the Modus’s roof.

The Death Of The Heart

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Today, I have been mostly watering plants.

Nicotiana now soars aloft.

Several of our clematises, such as Diversifolia Hendersonii

and Queen Mother in the front garden,

and Duchess of Albany on the Rose Garden pergola bear hats of invisible pixies frolicking and turning somersaults in the sunshine.

This lily has taken two years to bloom.

Many, like this one, live just one day.

Bees are drawn to our nasturtiums.

The kniphofias have poked their way up through the soil,

as have the red hot dahlias in the New Bed. The first is Bishop of Llandaff. I’m not sure about the others.

This view from the Shady Path encompasses

Margery’s hollyhocks.

While I was watering, Ronan was fixing our boiler, not that we will need heating any time soon.

This is the blurb on the back cover of

which I finished reading this evening.

When my blogging friend, Lisa learned that I was embarking on this novel she remembered that when she had read it, a long time ago, she had found it sad. I would trust Lisa’s judgement ahead of the book’s publicists.

If this is a story of adolescent love in the thirties, I am glad my teenage years were in the fifties. In my view it was more a tale of isolation and loneliness. I agree with the ‘Passion, misunderstanding…..’ paragraph above, but if this an example of ‘sublime sense of comedy’ it is so black as to be invisible to me. Remind me not to try The Orchid Trilogy.

Having said all this, I must concede that Bowen ‘is a major writer’. The book is well constructed; the prose is elegant; she has a keen eye for detail; and she develops character well. But does she like any of her creations?

Finally, Augustus John’s model has far more spirit about her than the unfortunate Portia.

This evening Jackie enjoyed a meal out with her friend, Pauline (not our NZ one); and I dined sumptuously on scrambled egg on toast and Doom Bar.

Tom Daley

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Jackie continued her creative miracles on the various beds. I rendered sporadic assistance in dead-heading, weeding, clearing up, and humping bags of compost.

Here are current views of The Head Gardener’s Walk

and The Gazebo Path, looking across Margery’s bed in which her hollyhocks are now in bloom.

Petunias in hanging baskets are ubiquitous,

as are lilies of many different kinds in various beds. Currently they share The New Bed with dahlias and clematises.

In the Rose Garden, before I’d finished dead-heading, the pink carpet rose was laid out before Love Knot, poppies, and petunias;

and For Your Eyes Only caught the sun.

Particularly in the morning, falling petals are suspended from spidery filaments. Spinning in the breeze some,

like this fuchsia, have the appearance of Tom Daley taking off,

or, such as this honeysuckle, shuttles aiming for space stations.

In case anyone needs to know this is what Wikipedia has to say about Tom Daley:

‘Thomas Robert “Tom” Daley (born 21 May 1994)^[2] is a British diver and television personality. Daley specialises in the 10 metre platform event and was the 2009 FINA World Champion in the individual event at the age of 15. He started diving at the age of seven and is a member of Plymouth Diving Club. He has made an impact in national and international competitions from age 9. He represented Great Britain at the 2008 Summer Olympics where he was Britain’s youngest competitor, the youngest competitor of any nationality outside the sport of swimming, and the youngest to participate in a final.^[5] In 2009, Daley reached a career best ranking of number one in the FINA World Diving Rankings for the ten-metre platform.^[6]

He won two gold medals for England at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, in the 10 metre synchro diving (with Max Brick) and the 10 m Individual Platform competition,^[7] and won the bronze medal for Great Britain in the individual competition at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.^[8]

After his success at the 2012 Olympic Games and a summer of great sporting interest amongst the public in the UK, television network ITV approached Daley to have a role in their new celebrity diving reality TV show Splash!. Daley made his debut in the show’s premiere on 5 January 2013 as a mentor to the celebrity competitors taking part.^[9]‘

With the increasing warmth, the butterflies are back.

Here a Peacock performs its trapeze routine on a hebe.

Ronan, from Tom Sutton, came to fix our boiler which has stopped working. Unfortunately there were several issues, one being a faulty control box which he will have to obtain tomorrow. We won’t stink, because we have an immersion heater in the shower.

Tonight we dined on Jackie’s wholesome heart casserole, creamy mashed potato, and crunchy carrots. The Culinary Queen drank Hoegaarden, and I made a start on the excellent Brancott Estate merlot/cabernet sauvignon 2014 given to me for my birthday by Shelly and Ron.

Getting The Hang Of It

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Naturally, I couldn’t wait to get out into the garden and play with my new toy. Confining myself to the Creative Automatic setting with the zoom lens, I made a few close-ups. I had about a 60% success rate.

Starting with lilies, here are some Asiatics dappled by sunlight;

a day lily basking in full sun;

and a fly exploring one in the New Bed.

Now to roses. Mamma Mia is maturing nicely;

Love Knot is prolific;

and this is For Your Eyes Only.

These beautiful penstemons also grace the Rose Garden.

The red Bottle Brush plants, now that the yellow one is over, are coming into their own.

I also did some dead-heading and cut the grass, while Jackie watered the pots, and tidied and catered for our weekend guests. These were my long-term friend, Jessie, and her flat-mate, Guru, who arrived in time for lunch.

After lunch we visited the New Zealand graves at St Nicholas’s church in Brockenhurst. This was of interest to Guru because he has recently been learning about the Indian Army involvement in World War One, and there are three Indians buried there. I photographed one of these on our previous trip. (The pictures that follow were made with the CanonSX700 HS)

Here are the other two.

On that day the light had been too strong for me to photograph the stone of the unknown Belgians who had worked in the hospital. Today was less bright.

One of the nineteenth century stones has had a tree push it over;

the lichen on another blended well with the wild flower meadow.

After this we attended the RNLI fundraising event at Gordon’s home in Downton Lane. This was an afternoon of jazz music and cream tea in the garden. It was very enjoyable.

We arrived too late for a traditional cream tea, but were amply compensated with home-made cakes and delicious strawberries and cream. Jessie amused us by furtling in her bag for sweeteners for her tea.

We dined on Jackie’s classic chicken jalfrezi, pilau rice, and parathas. She drank Hoegaarden, and I drank a Georges du Boeuf Fleurie 2014 that our guests had brought. Jessie’s choice was Irn-Bru, and Guru’s orange juice.

Spoiler Alert

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We were both reprieved from gardening duties this morning by the rain.

I scanned a few more colour slides from 1981/2.

Here Sam enjoys swinging in a hammock at the Drapers’ home in Meldreth near Royston in Cambridgeshire. This was August 1981.

In December that year we had a rare heavy fall of snow in Gracedale Road, Furzedown, South London. Matthew and Becky made the best of it. That was probably the only time in their childhoods that it was possible to create such a magnificent snowman.

Another Cambridgeshire venue was the home of Nigel and Judy Pearson at Pastures farmhouse in Caxton. At a Christmas party there, Sam tucked into his first pheasant. I remember biting a piece of shot. This was also the first time I had sampled such fare.

In September 1982 we spent a couple of weeks at the Vachettes’ chateau at Fontaine in Normandy.

This is the garden in which Jessica basks in a deckchair with Arnoux, Marie-Helene, and the Vachette parents. As can be seen by the colour of the grass this was a very hot autumn.

Lying at Jessica’s feet

is Louisa in her carrycot;

while Sam enjoys the toys she will soon grow into.

This afternoon the sun shone, not only here in Downton, but also in Wimbledon where a tense Gentlemen’s Final took place. I watched it on television.

I will not reveal the winner, but his wife looks on.

Afterwards I wandered around the garden, doing some sporadic dead-heading, whilst Jackie watered some more hanging baskets

containing petunias, mimuluses and lobelia.

She also slaked the the thirst of this urn containing petunias, trailing geraniums, and bidens, with penstemons at the side,

suspended in the Rose Garden.

The hydrangea at the corner of Elizabeth’s Bed is thriving;

as are the lilies and clematises in the New Bed;

and the hebes are coming into bloom.

This evening we dined on Mister Chatty Man’s Hordle Chinese Take Away. Jackie drank a blend of Hoegaarden and Bavaria non-alcoholic beer, while I consumed more of the Carignan Vieilles Vignes.

Remembering 7/7

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We have a number of hanging baskets around the kitchen doors.

This one contains fuchsia Blue Angel;

here clematis Warsaw Nike, from its pot clambers up to another containing petunias and lobelia. The white pot contains apple mint, and borage occupies the bed.

Nearby, bidens blooms.

The New Bed is now taking on its summer garb. Fuchsia, dahlias, lilies, clematises, and solanum are all in evidence.

As it is my birthday today, I received a lot of messages. Some of these were texts. For the last couple of months anyone trying to phone me on the mobile when I am at home has not been able to receive a reply and has been sent straight to voicemail. I have then received a text saying I have a voice message which I have not been able to access.

I have refrained from boring readers with this, but today I decided to visit O2 in Christchurch in an attempt to resolve the issue. The problem seemed to have been a faulty SIM card. This was changed, and hopefully things will have improved.

While the O2 man was fetching the new card I reflected on another birthday when I could receive no signal on the mobile phone. This was the day of the London Underground suicide bombs. I is hard to believe that was 11 years ago.

This afternoon we enjoyed, within minutes of each other, visits from Helen and from Shelly and Ron They came bearing gifts. Including Bill, each couple had brought a birthday card and presents of wine and a book, and we drank sparkling squashes on the hand-made garden chairs, of which we now have four, and one, otherwise relegated, perfectly serviceable in black plastic.

An additional gift from Helen and Bill was an intriguing bookmark, made of cork, that they had brought back from Portugal.

Ian and Becky’s present to me was a meal for the four of us at Lal Quilla. This was great fun, particularly as the staff entered so well into the spirit of the occasion. My choice of a main meal was Purple Tiger (a king prawn dish) and special fried rice. We shared onion bahjis, parka dahl, and an egg paratha. Becky drank red wine and the rest of us drank Kingfisher.

At the end the head waiter sang happy birthday and brought me a ‘cake’.

Favouritism?

During a brief lull in the wet and windy weather the forecasters tell us will worsen over the next two months, I met and spoke with Ralph, the owner of The Spinney, on my way to Hordle Cliff beach and back. He recounted the history of the once again closed Royal Oak pub on the corner of Downton Lane. Apparently a few years ago a family successfully ran it for nine years. They were always packed out. Having lost the country pub atmosphere under a series of successors, it has failed to survive since.
Despite the rain, men demolishing the older chalets in Shorefield Country Park were able to keep a bonfire going. The replacements, providing work for M. Doe, are being erected within a matter of days.
Jackie had bought a pomegranate for Flo, which enabled me to illustrate my post ‘The Bees’ of 29th May 2012 with a photograph. Our granddaughter eschewed the pin method favoured by Chris and me. She preferred to pick out the fleshy seeds with her fingers.
Some weeks ago, Jackie’s sister Helen had entrusted to her a tiny pair of ailing plants. Floppy little things, they seemed to be beyond being restored to health. Helen’s faith, however, has paid off. One was to be adopted by her sister, the other to be fostered in respite care.
What I thought was a dwarf passionflower has now flowered in its pot, and has the strength to climb up its supports. This is a clematis Sieboldii, appropriately nicknamed the passionflower clematis. Clearly a certain amount of favouritism has been employed, for this is the adopted twin, which has benefited from diluted tomato feed, and regular caresses and sweet nothings.The other, the foster child, although beginning to show signs of viable life, remains in an incubator in the utility room.

Errol’s lilies still enliven our sitting room.

Our dinner this evening consisted of Jackie’s delicious sausage casserole (recipe); mashed potato and swede; carrots and runner beans followed by a variety of sweets, mine being scones and strawberry jam. I finished the malbec.

P.S. Jackie tells me I got the wrong end of the stick over the plants. It was only last week that Helen had handed over her clematis for resuscitation. As can be seen, it has already responded to her sister’s equally attentive tender loving care.

Canal Holidays

When Errol brought the children down for the weekend on 1st, he gave us a large bunch of lilies. Each day since, we have watched for the opening of the petals. We were rewarded today. They now have quite a heady scent. The treasured stoneware vase containing them, was made for Jessica and me by Becky when she was studying art at Newark College in the 1990s.
Another memento of a wonderful weekend has been placed on her Facebook page by Louisa, who took this amazing iPhone photograph. The perfectly framed image shows Jessica and Imogen finishing off the sparklers they took home with them.

Hebes are blooming again in our garden.

I spent most of the day scanning fifteen very poor prints from 1980 and ’81. These were of varying shapes and sizes, often out of focus, and many had been produced with the use of ageing chemicals. None was larger than 9 x 11 cm. You could probably say it was a labour of love.

Our nephew Mark, fondly remembering canal holidays shared by my sister Jacqueline’s family and Jackie, Matthew, Becky and Ian Stockley, had, at Chris’s funeral on 31st October, asked for copies of Jackie’s thirty plus year old collection. The two families had very happy times on narrow boats. May of 1980 was the bobble hat month. Matthew, Becky, and their cousins James, Mark, Little Jack and Alex, all bought hand-knitted hats from the woman who had made them, then Becky, Mat, Little Jack, and Mark re-enacted the iconic Beatles 1969 ‘Abbey Road’ album cover along the canal bank.

That same year Becky wasn’t too confident when the boat got up to the maximum 4 mph. By May 1981, she must have been more so, but fell in the water and was fished out by Mark.

My sister Jacqueline was happier being photographed on entering the boat with her husband Jack, than when emerging from the public convenience.

Before producing the canal holiday print, I carried out a tester on an equally small but better preserved tender photograph of Becky and Flo who, albeit on tiptoe, had only been walking for about a month. This is quite heavily cropped. It was taken at the end of 1997 by Jackie, who, of course, had produced all the canal trip pictures.

This evening we dined at The Crown in Everton. I enjoyed my customary steak and kidney pudding, ball of winter vegetables encased in a skin of cabbage, chips and gravy; as did Jackie her scampi, chips and salad. We both chose steamed syrup sponge pudding and custard, and certainly didn’t regret it. Jackie’s drink was Peroni and mine was Doom Bar.

Fuchsias

This morning we completed a task Jackie had begun yesterday. We had a very leggy fig tree that practised the can-can through the foliage of surrounding trees. We have now reduced it to a much more modest level, trusting that it will soon be wearing a billowing skirt of suitable leaves.

Near this plot, suspended from one of the arms of a tree that now has no fig’s legs wrapped around it, hang two galvanised buckets filled with potted begonias. Wherever there is a hook or a place to put one, Jackie is inclined to attach a hanging basket, or anything else that might serve the purpose, containing an array of different flowers. One of her favourites is the fuchsia. A selection of these comprises of:

La Campanella, Harry Gray, Pink unknown, and Jennifer Anne.

There are many more that are either past their first flush, or have not yet reached it.

Another plant that is also manifested in numerous forms in our garden, is the day lily. We have two more new ones today. One is a deep mauve/red, the other, the most delicate pale yellow.

But, I couldn’t dwell among the flowers all day. This morning I finished cutting down the brambles and clematis from the kitchen garden fence whilst evading the dodgy wire network. This afternoon Jackie and I worked together to move the last of the cuttings pile nearer to the defunct wheelbarrow in which they shall be burnt.

Early this evening we did a big Tesco’s shop in preparation for our guests tomorrow.

As is usual, Jackie made enough chicken jalfrezi yesterday for us to enjoy it once or twice more. Tonight’s dinner was the once. It was accompanied by Cobra beer.