Happy New Year

It's a beautiful, bright and sunny morning here - one of those which makes you feel Spring is just around the corner (although I think that's being a little optimistic!).


Thank you for visiting my blog over the last few months. I hope we'll get to know one another better during 2007 - do please stop and say hello if you have time so that I can pay back the compliment.


I finally found the photos I was looking for and they're now on my computer. There aren't quite as many of the old garden (2 homes ago) as I thought, so I obviously haven't found them all yet. In the meantime here are a few to whet your appetite.


We knocked two cottages into one in 1999. The large extension at the back of the first one had already been built when we bought it. A few months later the second cottage (the white one) came onto the market and having thought we were downsizing from a large house in Bath and getting rid of our mortgage, we ended up with the same amount of space, the same sized garden and an equivalent mortgage! But it was 4½ years of fun.

The first garden (above) was half lawn, half bare veggie patch and a couple of ornamental trees. Some 3ft high interwoven fencing, a berberis hedge and two large conifers created the boundary between the two cottages. We ripped out the hedge and burned the fence, but kept the conifers. Looking through the door, the end of the lawn is about the half-way point and the pièce de resistance was a walnut tree just beyond. Behind the walnut tree we erected my pride and joy - a 10 ft x 12 ft greenhouse.


Some of the second garden had been used for vegetables and the rest was rough ground. Many man-hours later and I was in seventh heaven! In 4 years I grew a 160 ft x 55 ft jungle and loved every minute of it. I hope I can do the same again, although I'm a few years older now, not quite so bendy but full of the same gardening enthusiasm for the challenge ahead. This photo is taken from halfway down garden no. 2 looking back towards the house. Believe it or not there's a pathway from where I was standing back under the arch. As a friend once said - I do "joined up gardening"!

And to finish off, here are a couple of evening skies from our last cottage. Please enlarge these if you can, the colours are amazing!

Happy New Year everyone!