Family gathering for mum's birthday

My mum and her five children together for her 88th birthday. Note to self: put satchel down for photo shoots. I've forgotten why I was carrying my sister's cardigan.

<< This pic shows my niece-in-law with her baby, my new great-niece, my eldest daughter, my sister, Mum, and my eldest niece. Below are my eldest nephew, Mum, eldest brother, uncle (mum's brother; my dad was an only child).

Mum has five kids, fourteen grandkids and, so far, five great-grandkids, with two more due this month.

I have two grandchildren, bro holding onto mum on the bank is about to become a grandad, next bro has three grankids (one of whom is just visible in the background; she didn't want to be photographed), and one due soon.

Because of my broken arm, DerbyshireDaughter and I travelled by train and bus from her house in Derbyshire (on the Manchester side of the Dark Peak) via Preston, to the meetup on the eastern edge of the Lancashire Fylde.

Lopping a tree or two

old cypress up top

Our friends from two fields away came with chain saws and anti-midge spray yesterday and chopped into logs most of the collapsed part of the old cypress up at the top of the garden, the one that was smothering everything in its vicinity. In the first photo above, beyond the wood pile, you can see the main trunk of the birch tree. Before the collapse of the cypress that was completely hidden, even on its further away side. The collapse of half the cypress pulled its still standing trunks more upright and away from the birch. We left some of the cut trunks as a counterweight. Whether it'll be sufficient, time will tell. Meanwhile, the root rot at the base of the cypress blooms on. (Can one talk of blooming fungi?)

We used the broken old step-ladder that was leaning against the old rowan (scorched trunk at left of first photo) when we moved here, plus another random metal pole that we found, to prop up the wood pile. One day I'll do a post about Boggy Brae garden metal finds!

Old rowan, with its new bit, decorated with a beard
of cypress roots. Like rhododendron ponticum, this
cypress sent roots down from ground-touching branches.

The lopping opened up the view a bit

While the chain saw was out, BJ-of-2-fields-away (definitely not BoJo!) lopped some of the overgrown sallow that's up top as well and some of the top heavy and leaning towards the house prunus tree on the front bank. I've a bit of tidying up to do and a few roaring bonfires of green, terpene-rich smaller cypress branches to enjoy.

Sallow, left, to be added to the as yet not very dead dead-hedge that can be seen top left of the photo and, below, some branches of the overgrown front bank prunus tree to be tidied up.

There is a lovely fresh piney smell up here!

The original deal was that our friends would take half the wood but since we made that deal they've found another source of free wood (free but for the work, I mean) nearer to them so they didn't need it this year. When they do need some more wood they can come and hack away at the fallen wild cherry. The upper of the two cherry trunks shown below is still alive but the lower one is, as one might say in yoof speak, well dead. And there is a lot of dead wood above it too, still propped up for the best drying effect by the old cherry tree's offspring.

dead cherry wood

The back terrace is staying un-mown for now

Having slain one of the ponticum dragons that was blocking my view to the pond (I say slain but it'll grow again; I'm going to try and keep it small), I was very excited to find three Northern Marsh Orchids growing on the back terrace! I'm so glad I only thought about mowing there this week!

There are now five of these dotted about, all self-sown. I did try to grow some from seed but failed so I'm pleased these have turned up voluntarily.

The single Southern Marsh Orchid is coming along too but it takes longer to colour its flower.

Southern Marsh Orchid

I just learned from Fuchsias in the City (@Fuchsiarius) that my pale fuchsia is probably Fuchsia magellanica 'Alba'. Nice to know its name at last. I had thought it was 'Hawkshead' but Fuchsiarius says that variety should have a pure white corolla. You can see some pink in this one.

So, dragonly, orchidly, and fuchsialy a satisfying day, not to mention a kind friend digging out some orange tights for me to wear with a dress I was thinking of wearing to my mum's 88th birthday lunch in a few weeks' time.

perfect match!

Elder

The Boggy Brae's self-seeded elder tree is nearly flowering. It grows in the shade of a rowan so its flowering is  behind that of its parent tree in the nearby copse.

copse elder

The lower branches of BB-elder have bowed down to the ground to get more light but some others are stretching up high into the rowan. Last autumn, when the rowan had lost all its leaves, the elder leaves were a bright shot of green. I enjoyed that.

Rhododendron Up Top

If you squinted and strained your neck the newly flowering rhododendron up at the top of the garden was just visible between some sallow branches trunks which were only not lying on the ground under their own top-heaviness because a couple of birch trees were propping them up.

sallow leaning on birch

This morning I decided to cut them down so that I'd have a clear view to UpTop Rhodo from the back door. They were even heavier than I expected. I felled all four but there are still three to cut up into more manageably sized pieces. That's for another day.

Elsewhere in the garden white flowers apart from pignut are showing up brightly. Clockwise from top left: a white foxglove, white clover, a white bell-flower than came from I know not where but which is very welcome, and Libertia grandiflora, another welcome self-introduced plant. Three years ago it had three flowering shoots, last year six, and this year sixteen. I hope it spreads.


Another pic of UpTop's flowers and the view east from it:

Bee house under the step

Looking south from back door yesterday afternoon

There are very few days when it's warm enough to sit outside to eat one's muesli. Yesterday was one such. I put one of my sit-upon-ery mats on the middle stone step at the front and enjoyed the morning. Looking down to the bottom step–a rough slab of conglomerate added after some house settling, I think–I saw a small bumblebee disappear 'into' the step. I had noticed it had an arch in previous years but hadn't seen anything going into the hole.

the rough conglomerate step

The first pic shows where the bee went in. A bee came out of the other end of the step (second pic) several times. Whether it was one bee or several I don't know. I didn't get any pics of the actual bee.
I wondered, sitting there munching muesli, whether I should mow the back terrace yet but decided to wait a bit. The primroses that have seeded themselves from elsewhere in the garden onto the terrace haven't fnished flowering and making seed yet.




The photo below is of a small bit of the back terrace where bugle and ferns grow on and near the retaining wall.

Earthy grounding

The morning after the terrorist attack at Manchester Arena two lines from Tennyson's poem Tears, Idle Tears kept repeating themselves in my head:

Tears from the depth of some Divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes.

The poet says he knows not what the "idle tears" mean but I knew what mine meant: deep anguish and sympathy for what the families of the killed and injured must be suffering today and for many days to come. People driven to acts of such violence by mad ideologies are deluded.

People are saying that we need to do something in addition to just carrying on as normal, but certainly normal, or as normal as you can, is grounding. The gap I cut through the azaleas on the front bank was ready to be widened so I went at it with the hedge-cutter. Along the way I found myself talking to three tiny oak seedlings just erupting from their acorns: "You can't grow here, little tree. Not right under the big birch tree and so close to the house."

NW end of front bank with birch tree
and a gateway I've cut through the rhododendron hedge

It always feels sad to have to pull out little trees (well, not ash and sycamore! They are just weeds round here) but there are at least three more young oaks near the top of the garden where there is room for them to grow. Two of them are now taller than me and one actually produced two or three acorns last year.

I needed a nap after my gap-widening efforts but went out again afterwards to dig up some dock plants at the bottom of the same front bank. With the dock roots up came some of the creeping rhizomes of Sharp-flowered Rush that also grows down there. My hands got damply earthy but as they dried and even with soil on them, they felt clean in a smooth and quite different way from newly washed hands. This was the 'grounding' I needed after today's sad news. Perhaps it is something to do with being reminded that we are with the earth and of it, dust to dust, stardust even as Carl Sagan said.

Between the dock and rush patch and the drive hedge I found what I think is a Northern Marsh Orchid in pretty much the same place as there was one last year. Previously our single Southern Marsh Orchid, which grows at the top of the bank, has reappeared in the same spot for several years but the Northern Marsh Orchids, of which there are usually a few dotted about, always seem to come up in different places each year. It would be nice to think this one now has an established root. I marked where it is with a stick and a bit of ribbon so that it doesn't get any more trampled than it already is!

Orchid marker near the hedge

At the lower end of that hedge is my young hawthorn tree. It has flowered for the first time this year. Its parent is beyond on the far side of the lane. Massed ivy growth has weighed down its trunk to almost horizontal but it is thriving still. The light you can see beyond the trees is the loch. There are some houses down there before it but the drop from the hawthorn down to them is very steep so we look over their roofs.

I have two small hawthorns in pots to give to a friend. They were recently moved to the porch because, guess what!, the deer nibbled their tops. They are doing fine.