Mud, Mud Inglorious Mud...

Blueberry Leaves In Autumn

It's been a funny year.  It's the end of November, but I've only started heating the greenhouse in the past few days. Our cherry trees, whose leaves usually turn glorious sunset colours before dropping, are hanging on like leaden green rags. Out in the wood there's been more in the way of seasonal colour. Birch leaves are small and heart-shaped, hazel leaves deckle-edged discs. With the shortening days they've all turned bright yellow. One or two seedlings have escaped from the beech wood to light up the understorey of the conifer plantation. They make it look cheerful on the dullest day. When the sun shines, they really glow.

In the garden at Tottering Towers, the blueberry bushes always put on a great autumn show. They're the plant with everything—beautiful flowers which bees love, delicious fruit, and each November they turn fiery red, without fail. They grow best in lime-free soil and must never dry out, but as they'll grow happily in containers this isn't a problem. Mine are planted in big plastic tubs filled with ericaceous compost. They stand in trays which I keep topped up with rainwater. Unlike most plants, blueberries don't mind standing in water.

The whole countryside around here is used to wet feet. It's been drizzly for weeks, but a few days ago the weather turned stormy. Torrential rain went on for hours, only relieved by heavy showers. The River Wye is higher than it's been for months. Sliding down banks between forest tracks is like the worst episodes of cross-country running at school. With most of the leaves now off the sweet chestnuts of the bluebell wood and the ground covered with nuts, squirrels are everywhere. Alex, our retriever/labrador cross is far too slow to catch them before they spring up to safety in the trees. That doesn't stop him trying. When we reach a road on our walks I put him on the lead for safety. I have to be careful to spot the squirrels before he does, as he's prone to mad dashes. Yesterday, he saw a squirrel I didn't, leapt forward and almost yanked the lead out of my hand. Next thing I knew, I was flat on my back looking up at the sky through those last few autumn leaves. I'd lost my footing on the muddy ground, and went down splat.  Luckily this happened only a hundred yards from our house. It was a cold, wet walk home!

A Rest Is As Good As A Change…

By Henriette Browne

For the last four months, I’ve been putting in hours of extra work a week while trying to write two books at the same time. 

My first job each day is to collate the research I’ve done so far for my major non-fiction project, Women Of Bristol, and add to it. All that work is done on the computer. When I need a break from the screen, I curl up with a pencil and a big refill pad of lined paper. It’s the way I like to write fiction, so that’s how the next book in my Brackenridge Series, Dead Woman Walking, is taking shape.

Last week, OH had a week’s holiday. He was going to spend it doing repairs and maintenance around Tottering Towers, but I led him astray. Apart from rain over the Bank Holiday weekend, the weather was fine and dry. It seemed such a shame to stay indoors working, so the two of us spent seven days roaming the countryside. 

Bees hard at work

As a result, I didn’t write a word all week. I can’t remember the last time that happened! Not only did I do nothing, I was guilty of doing what my old English teacher used to call doing less than nothing by distracting OH, too. I took him out to lunch a couple of times,  and persuaded him to visit the open day at Jekka McVicar’s Herb Farm with me. We visited a garden centre, which meant another lunch out for him, and some retail therapy for me. 

Delicious, and good for you, too!

I ended last week with a total word count of zero, but a dozen new plants. Our apricot crop set the seal on the week by ripening all at once. It's just a little tree, so there were only three fruits. I sneakily ate them all myself. Call it gardener’s perks! 

Today it’s back to writing work, but I love it so much there’s no danger of the post-holiday blues. I feel tons better for my break, and can’t wait to get writing again.

What’s your favourite remedy for working too hard?

This Writing Life...in Summer.

Sun Behind The Heel Stone, by Andrew Dunn

It's high summer here on the border between England and Wales.  The 21st June is the Summer Solstice, and for the next day or two the days will be longer and the nights shorter than at any other time of the year. That means different things to different people. 

While Druids, hippies and others gather at Stonehenge to celebrate, I'm busy putting the last of my tender plants out in the garden, and looking forward to the first baby vegetables of the season. 

I'm already enjoying the lovely Turkish delight fragrance of the rose you can see further down this page, Louise Odier, and honeysuckle Graham Stuart Thomas as they drape round my favourite fine-weather writing spot in the garden. Their scent is particularly powerful at dawn, or after a shower.

The trouble with all these extra hours of daylight is that it's not only the fruits, flowers and vegetables which get growing. The weeds have eighteen or more hours of daylight to stage their takeover bid, so it's hard to keep on top of them while I'm writing all day. When I leave the office, I have to catch up on all the cooking and washing before I can get outside and start weeding.

We're usually eating new potatoes fresh from the garden by early June. The old saying that you should plant your early potatoes on Good Friday comes from the time when working people had hardly any paid time off, so they had to do all their chores on public holidays such as Easter. I was so busy with the release of His Majesty's Secret Passion  and Her Royal Risk this year, I didn't get a chance to plant ours until much later. You can't stop a potato growing, so they're trying hard to catch up but it'll be a while before we'll get to eat them. You're supposed to sow parsley seed on Good Friday too, and I missed out on doing that too, this year!

Right now, I'm working on a Christmassy short story. Publishing schedules are a bit like gardening— you have to think months in advance. If you'd like to help me choose the cover art for my next release, you can join my mailing list here.

Growing Wild...

The View From My Window

Today I'm publicising something that's as close to my heart as writing.  Anything that helps my bees thrive and produce plenty of delicious honey gets my vote, so I'm all in favour of the Grow Wild project. Their motto is "Flower to the People" (groan), and it's a project that's both useful and beautiful.

GrowWildUK is a nationwide project supported by the Big Lottery Fund and masterminded by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. It's a programme that will run for four years, bringing people together to sow UK native wild flowers. They want to transform the whole country, turning unloved spaces into wildlife-friendly wild flower havens.

Busy Bees, via Wikimedia

One of our neighbours has spent the last couple of years turning a paddock into a wildflower meadow. This is its first year of flowering, and the effect is stunning. Tottering Towers is following suit, but starting small. We've spent years building up the fertility here, so the patch we choose will have to be stripped of a lot of goodness, or big tough plants like nettles and bracken will out-compete the smaller (and usually prettier) plants.

Wild orchids have popped up spontaneously only a mile or two away from here, so with luck the spores will find us eventually. Until then, we'll be concentrating on the simple, annual flowers that bees love, such as all sorts and sizes of native daisies, along with poppies, foxgloves and other "pretty weeds" such as scarlet pimpernel. They're the type of thing that will thrive anywhere, from cracks between inner city paving to our country garden.

Watch this space for updates about how we get on!

Refilling the Creative Writing Well...

By Martyn Stanley

The surge of spring is well under way. These bluebells surround our house like the sea, and  for a few precious weeks each year their blue tide sweeps through the wood.

Growing things gives me a break from writing and gives my mind a chance to freewheel. I can develop fictional characters and formulate new stories. This week, I've been planting salads out in the Greenhouse #1, and looking forward to the first tabbouleh of summer. Tomato plants give off a powerful fragrance which reminds me of when I was little, as my father used to grow hundreds of the things. The perfume of lilac blossom is another trigger for memories. The house where I grew up had double white lilacs all along one boundary. In the low light of dusk and dawn the flowers glowed like banks of snow. I used to think it was an extra present, as my birthday falls this month. Things were so much simpler back then!

The dawn chorus is another powerfully evocative spur for me at this time of year. The birds start singing before first light. That's when I like to go outside for some thinking time. Sitting in the garden with a cup of tea, waiting for the performance to begin eases me gently into my working day. It's usually a robin who starts singing first here. There are two song thrush nests close to the house, one in the kitchen garden and a second in  a holly tree on the lower lawn. I like their songs second only to the nightingales that sing a few miles up the road. There are blackbirds nesting in the ivy encrusting our old shed, and once the male starts warbling from the ridge of the bigger greenhouse, I know it's time to get ready for the school run.

Sunday, 4th May, is National Dawn Chorus Day. The thought of yet another "day" to add to all the other weird and wonderful promotional activities dreamt up by marketing men usually provokes yawns of boredom. Not this time. We'll be heading off to Highnam before 4am, to see if the famous Gloucestershire nightingales are on song. Then it'll be back home for a great British breakfast. The smell of frying bacon is another memorable experience. It makes me want to write a piece on why I could never be completely vegetarian...

What inspires you to write?

Two By Two...

English people are supposed to be obsessed by the weather. This is often true, but then as the saying goes, other countries have a climate. Here in the UK, we have weather. I think we can all be forgiven for obsessing about it a bit during 2012. For the first few months of the year, a drought was declared after several very dry winters. According to the Met Office men, being snowbound for days on end doesn't count. That's the "wrong sort of moisture", apparently. Some parts of our relatively small country were under hosepipe bans, although here in our part of Gloucestershire it never got that bad. Then it began to rain, and any number of events were waterlogged, including Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. After that things went from bad to worse. Festival sites were jammed with vehicles axle deep in mud. Tottering Towers could have been twinned with Camelot - each summer morning dawned with glorious blue skies, but the fantasy was soon blotted out by black clouds in time for the deluge to really get under way after dark. Tottering Towers stands near the top of a hill, but even so everywhere is saturated. The grass gets squelchier the closer you get to the bottom greenhouse, but once inside it's a warm, dry haven. Unfortunately I'm not the only one who enjoys its protection: it's become a Noah's Ark for just about every vole, shrew and mouse for miles around. I've caught dozens for release a couple of miles away in the woods, but I'm not convinced they don't find their way straight back! They've excavated tunnels under all the borders, so most of the  plants look pretty sick. Luckily, we'd enjoyed all the strawberries from the greenhouse while the weather was still dry,  but the little pests have started shinning up the cherry tomato plants to get at the fruit!