A gardening yearbook

My attack on the stash of calendars in my studio continued today, and the follow up to Dali was Alan Titchmarsh’s 2004 calendar:

I decided to make another portfolio with this, but using my preferred coptic binding instead of the accordion binding I used last time.  All twelve of the calendar pages were used to make envelopes/pockets, and then bound in chronological order so that this portfolio is the perfect place to store notes, plant tags or small packets of seeds throughout the entire gardening year.

A close up of one of the pockets:

The front cover of the calendar was used to create the covers for this portfolio.

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Beehive compost bin

I’d planned a day in my studio, but when I went downstairs this morning I was seized with the very strong urge to build something.  I probably should have gone for a lie down until the urge passed, but instead I sat and pondered for a while and then managed to knock this up out of most of the remaining leftover timber I had.

I’ve been hankering for one of those beehive wormeries for ages, but have never been able to justify the cost.  This is a compost bin rather than a wormery, but should suit me just as well.  It’s quite small (approx 40cm square, and about 60cm high), but my garden doesn’t generate a huge amount of waste so hopefully it will suffice!

It’s stacked, so the sections aren’t joined, for ease of access.  The front of the bottom section is loose so that it can be pulled off when I eventually need to get at the compost.

I’m really pleased with it.  It was much easier to build than I thought it would be (and, amazingly, I didn’t chip my nail varnish – this is a small but very pleasing fact!), it used up most of the timber that had been cluttering up the garden, and it looks lovely.  I’ve already started filling it up with the garden waste I had lying around (I had a bit of a tidy up on Tuesday afternoon), and I’ve instructed my mother to start saving the veg waste and teabags

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A magical light…

I’ve been wanting to add some fairy lights to my garden since I finished the landscaping phase, but finances have held me back somewhat.  I’m still broke, but I spotted a bargain at the Chelsea Flower show and snapped up two sets of fairy lights (50 lights on a 5 metre string, £10 each – bargaintastic!).  On Friday I painstakingly wound them around two of the posts in my garden (the ones with the Trachelospermum jasminoides and the Clematis cirrhosa, for those who are interested in the fine details), and I loved the effect so much that on Sunday I went out and treated myself to some flower-shaped fairy lights (Sainsburys, £19.99 per set – 20 lights per string – currently on BOGOF).  These were even more troublesome to put up.  I wound one set very carefully into my contorted hazel, and it took the best part of 45 minutes to get just right.

Well worth the effort:

And a photo taken in the daylight to show that they really are just as pretty when they’re not lit:

The fairy lights on the posts have proved much more difficult to photograph, so here is a very bad photograph just because I doubt whether I’ll be able to take a better one:

You’ll just have to trust me when I say that the fairy lights look much prettier in the flesh!  I still have one set of the flower lights, and I’m holding onto them until I’m absolutely certain about where I want to put them.

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Honeysuckle and happiness

The garden is looking remarkably well at the moment, and it’s sheer bliss to sit in it when I’ve finished work for the day.  The climbing roses are filling the air with their fragrance, and to my delight the honeysuckle has just started flowering too.

Honeysuckle is one of my favourites, not least because I love to taste the flowers.  I learned this trick from my father, and it never occurred to me that other people didn’t know about it – until quite recently, when I realised that I hadn’t met anyone who didn’t give me a strange look when I mentioned it in passing.

So, before showing you some more of my latest notebooks, I’ll give you a quick lesson in sampling the sweet delights of honeysuckle.

First, let’s see the flower itself:

These flowers only opened yesterday, so they’re very fresh and not yet as sweet as I like – ideally you want to taste them when they’re a few days old and have matured a bit.  Remove a flower from the plant:

Right, you see the green bit at the base?  You need to use your thumbnail to gently remove that – but don’t cut all the way through, because you’re going to pull that green bit away with the stamen still attached, so that what you end up with looks like this:

When you pull the stamen out, you’ll notice a small bead of fluid being pulled down to the base of the flower:

Click on the photo if you need a closer view.  That drop of liquid is the sweet nectar, and it’s divine.  You don’t get much, but one little drop can lift the spirits marvellously!  Try it, and if you do please report back and let me know!

Back to business, I was actually down in my garden for a reason this afternoon (and not just to relax); I went down to my studio to finish another couple of books:

More stab bindings, as I’m having fun with them at the moment, but there is another project fermenting in my brain so watch this space!

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From island to garden…

I must apologise for the long gap between entries, but I’d like to tell you a story which will explain my absence:

Once upon a time there was an artist, and she worked on her sitting room floor.  After two years of this her osteopath lectured her almightily and told her to get herself a studio so she could sit at a desk and stop ruining her back.

So she did…

She was lucky enough to find an amazing studio space in a rickety building on an island.  It was quirky, inspiring, peaceful and very beautiful.  She absolutely loved it.

The artist worked in her studio for a year, but at the end of that year things changed at home, and following her father’s death she decided that she would like to spend more time closer to the home which she now shared solely with her mother.  It was a hard decision to make, but she thought long and hard and eventually decided to give up her island retreat and build a studio in her garden instead.

The garden had become a little neglected due to the sad events at home and was in desperate need of a revamp:

She worked hard for a month, putting in as much time as she could to get the garden, and her new studio, ready.  It was hard both physically and emotionally because the garden had been very much her father’s for the past couple of years, as the artist’s work had kept her too busy to care for it herself.  The old shed had been put up by her father, and the whole garden held many memories.  But grief is a strange thing, and people manage it in their own way.  The artist found that redesigning the garden and taking down the shed and pergola which her father had so lovingly built did not diminish the memories.  On the contrary, she found that everything she did took on a greater meaning as she wondered what her father would say if he were there.

It took a month, a lot of hard work (some of which was helped along by her partner, Matt), and at times a lot of swearing too (!) but the garden is finally almost ready.

It’s not quite finished.  There is still work to be done in the garden, and more things to move into the studio – but it’s almost there and it seemed like a good time to show and tell.

The End.

For more information on Johnsons Island, please visit http://www.brentfordgallery.co.uk/

To see more photographs of Johnsons Island, as taken by the fabulous Katherine Palmer, please click here.

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Sketch – 31/03/2009

I’m really pleased with the way this came out, as I had to use a photograph for reference. I’d been so busy at work in this garden that I ran out of time on my parking meter, so had to leave very abruptly when I’d finished. I snapped a pic though, and did the sketch that evening. I love this garden, and have only recently re-started the maintenance for it after a break of a year whilst the client maintained it.

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Sketch – 13/03/2009

The first sketch in my book! This sketch is of a pond that my colleague Tracey and I had been renovating (rebuilding the waterfall etc.), and we were really happy with the way the job had gone. The sketch was done on site and the colour added at home later.

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