Alnwick Garden part two...

The Grand Cascade

Part one happened roughly four years ago but it feels longer.  Hours were spent getting around all the different 'rooms', having never seen them before.

This time, I didn't take anything in for the first half hour as there were lots of people = hectic movement and noise.  My brain can't quite cope with this, triggering the fight or flight response.

I bail out to the toilets, incredibly there's no one in there so for a while I just watch the glass sinks changing colour.  This is not hallucination, they really do - moving seamlessly from blue to green to yellow beautifully.  By the time they hit purple I'm good to go.

It's very hot in a muggy, sticky kind of way and I'm having a thermostat malfunction, which basically means I feel like a pig on a spit.

inside the labyrinth

The Bamboo Labyrinth

A new feature of the garden is a bamboo labyrinth, better than a maze of hedges 'cos it is enclosed - a tunnel of welcome dark green shade that smells strongly of peat.  Bliss

There are two very tall tunnels of hornbeam running either side of the Grand Cascade.  Rooms made from trees are just genius.  I want one.

The Hornbeam tunnel

A lot of the walkways are covered with structures supporting honeysuckle, clematis, climbing roses, providing perfume and shade.  Ending in a little round room with a bench so you can just sit and look.  Fair play to the garden designers.

Rose Garden walkway

 

The Alnwick Rose

 

The Roots & Shoots Garden

This is a whole new area for growing fruit, vegetables and flowers as companion plants.  It is also used as an open classroom for local school children, who have their own beds complete with homemade scarecrows.  If it rains there is a full-size tepee with scatter cushions for them to retreat to. 

Right now the tepee is surrounded by a huge amount of dahlias.  It gave me a rush to see them (how sad am I?).  Some were as big as dinner plates, with so many different types and in-your-face colours I can't help but love these darlings.

A football-sized lemon yellow dahlia

The Bishop of Dover - a more sober character altogether. 

The pinwheel perfection that is Honka Surprise

The best bit of the Roots & Shoots area for me are the two hives and the hundreds of honey bees.  They are in a sort of enclosure planted with the nectar-rich things bees adore.  The hum of activity and purpose is mesmerising.

I have a new found familiarity and admiration for bees now so many of them come into my garden, all different types. I often weed or prune with them buzzing loudly in my face or ears and we get along fine.

The Alnwick bees have access to a shed via a plastic tube, some live in there permanently in honeycombs between glass so us humans can see them at work.  This is great.  Hundreds of small brown bodies, drones and workers, all crammed together doing their particular job.

 

 

it really is the case that you can learn something every day.  Here's what I learned that day:

Bees have lived on earth for over 30 million years

Bees have 5 eyes and see the world in different colours so that they can spot flowers easily

Bees have two stomachs, one to digest food and another to carry nectar back to the hive

The Queen Bee can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day and can choose whether she lays male or female eggs 

More later, ta-ta for now :)

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Greygirl goes North (east)

Sometimes it's necessary to let more light into the garden and open it up a little.  Leave the den and sniff the air elsewhere.

Elsewhere the air was salty, with that edge-of-earth feeling, like you are close to a freedom of sorts.
The north east coast.

There were hedges along the roads stuffed full with wild honeysuckle and brambles, great green and yellow fields of crops stretching for miles beyond, red stone buildings and a blue strip of the North sea never far away. 

An abundance of wild flowers to jog the memory and shake out the names you used to know.

Ragwort, red valerian, common mallow, coltsfoot, rosebay willow herb, bladder campion, toadflax, pink fog grass.

ivy-leaved Toadflax

red Valerian

Sea air is a superb sleeping draught - never mind the balms, the herbal teas, Chopin, The Shipping Forecast, prescription drugs.

I don't care how early I wake up after sleeping at night, in a bed, knowing I have slept is enough, and that for a while at least I shut down and switched off. The insomniac's holy grail.

At 4.30 am the telegraph wires were full of swifts chatting noisily with eachother, coming and going quickly, and a team of acrobatic sparrows bouncing in the pampas grass after the seeds.

The early bleatings of nearby sheep every now and again, then a gull would call, to remind you where you are.

In my mind's eye one tiny village is framed simply as a blue house hung with bunting against a blue sky.

cottage at Craster

 

 

Gertrude Jekyll's Garden

 Gertrude Jekyll's garden at Lindisfarne Castle was bright as a painter's palette with great splodges of orange, yellows, pinks and blue.  A vast bed of cornflowers edged with the silvery-grey of Lambs Ears.  Hot pink mallow, cosmos, white daisies and anenomes.

Blood-red hollyhocks and a darker, poisonous-looking one, great trees of bronze fennel.

 

It was good to see there is now a stone plaque inside the garden commemorating old Gertrude...a raven would be a nice nod to Lutyens.

In the garden all the plant supports were made from hazel or birch branches - most dripping with sweet peas of bright reds and purples.

On Lindisfarne there was no sea mist this time, everything looked sharp and clear.  The warm air was humid and the sun hot.  The kind of day when all the signs are that it is summer - really and truly. 

I have more to share from this garden and Alnwick also...watch this space...

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Booting Up

While my brain is in start-up mode after getting up from the sofa or, if I'm lucky, bed, a wander round the garden is the best way to accelerate this slow process.  I begin to notice things.

This morning it was the neighbourhood flock of homing pigeons doing their circuit across the sky with the fluttering sound of wings in the quiet.
Then a female blackbird at the bottom of the garden amongst the dill swallowing a slug. This sight pleasing me more than it should.
Sadly, a drowned bee up-ended in the water on the bird feeder.
But then, the new red of a Cherry Glow poppy that's just opened, replacing the first one that after only a day was destroyed by heavy rain.

And it's not even 8am.

New garden lovelies...

the late flowering Allium Sphaerocephalon - nip to bees

new arrival - the Cherry Glow poppy

Cherry Glow and Vipers Bugloss

cosmos Dazzler and Feverfew

Honka - a star dahlia

the luscious Twynings Revel

great blooms and bronze foliage - what's not to love?

All the dahlias are growing together in pots like a heavenly host of coral,crimson,orange and yellow.

I am grateful to grandad Billy Pick for passing this particular love to me :)

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All the Big Trees

The Copper Beech in the Storey Garden

Over the years I've seen this tree decorated with ribbons and art works, it's trunk pasted with silver and gold prayer papers, but for a long time now the tree has been left alone.

A narrow path passes directly underneath where you can stand for as long as you like and be enclosed, look up into the canopy which is so many different greens in the filtered light.

Your first view of this tree however is one of bronze and red-purple, deep and dark.  This big tree likes to brood.

Looking Up

It's a good thing to look up, I reckon, either at the tops of trees or buildings and even better - the sky.

Otherwise you can spend too much time looking at the ground or your feet, other people, traffic, commercial mess and sprawl.

I know I'm a country girl at heart but I recommend this to anyone.  When the sky is not dishcloth grey and there are clouds I can feel 10 years old again.  That cloud looks like Iceland! After a while staring into infinite blue I think I'm looking at a painting.

Here are some pics I took while looking up in my garden.

Blue is...

freedom

escape

infinity

the horizon

sea

sky

beyond reach

deep

rich

cool

home

melancholy

contemplative

lapis lazuli turquoise azure cobalt ultramarine prussian cerulean