The season of frost and photography
Monday 10 January
-
I am terrible for putting jobs off. I know I should prune my roses, but some of them are bravely blooming on. Not all of them obviously, and not particularly beautifully, but they are specks of colour in an otherwise rather grim landscape. I don't prune them today either (you cannot prune roses whilst wearing a woolly jumper, you simply get ensnared), but I do cut the most lovely of the flowers and bring them indoors.
Tuesday 11 January
-
The roses might be battling on out of season, but the winter clematis (Clematis cirrhosa) are in their element. I have one by the backdoor (Freckles) and one by the front door (Wisley Cream). Both bring great joy. The Wisley Cream primarily to the postman given that, in true rural style, we never use the front door ourselves.
Wednesday 12 January
-
Photographs and filming in the field and then in the house. Matt Austin weaves his usual magic (he really is a genius). Photographs of frost, and clouds of misty breath, and leaves under a sheet of ice. And then indoors for sweet pea sowing, lighting the fire, and Hugo being the star of the show. He is nothing like as elegant or beautiful as the girls, but he more than makes up for it with a willingness to pose.
Matt also made a little film of the field and the cottage which I posted on the Gather blog this morning. Thank you to everyone who has messaged me or commented to say how much they adored it.
Thursday 13 January
-
An afternoon in the Folly at The Pig at Combe with Ginny. The building itself is beautiful, the food is wonderful, the company inspiring and uplifting, and the layers of landscape (I swear you can see Dartmoor) shrouded in a very light mist. I drive home in the most perfect of pink skies with my heart full, passing gritters waiting in the lanes. The big clear skies only mean one thing.
It is about to get very cold.
Friday 14 January
-
And it does. The ground is hard and there is a cold, thick fog hanging over the hill. As I drive to work, the distinctive silhouette of the alder trees by the football ground is even more dramatic in the cloudy air. I look at these trees a lot. Partly because that it where the traffic backs up, and partly because I am quite preoccupied with them. I don’t have the right ground to grow an alder and (to my knowledge) there is only one in my village, but I would give anything to get my hands on some of their cones for dyeing.
Saturday 15 January
-
An even harder frost this morning. I check on my winter leaves. I am growing them under glass this year, less for protection from the cold than because the tail end of the last growing season was horrendous for slugs. At least I think it was slugs, but nothing I put in the ground after August really thrived. The leaves are fine, even the spinach, even though there is ice on the inside of the glass.
Sunday 16 January
-
A day in the studio, seed and book packing with a little Agatha Christie. If you are waiting for a signed copy of Grow & Gather, I have been faithfully promised the next drop on 19 January…
& a quick message for the Gather members, I have restocked almost everything so feel free to have a look.
