Drawn to the Country

Since moving to the country just over a decade ago I have been compelled to record the beauty I find in the every-day, as the seasons come and go, and for a few years now, I have been sharing my thoughts and sketches on rural life through this blog.

I am, however, also a big fan of printed matter, of proper books with paper pages that can you can flick through over morning coffee. Books that will spend an evening with you on the sofa, lodge by your bedside or cheer up a good friend.

With this in mind, I'm really excited to announce the publication of DRAWN TO THE COUNTRY.

Arranged seasonally, over 128 pages, the book takes you through the delights and challenges of a year in the Suffolk countryside... You'll hear about my gardening exploits, be introduced to my chickens, meet some extraordinary Suffolk characters and take some day trips to the coast and beyond!  

"Mary has beautifully captured the unique character of my home county Suffolk in this delightful book." 

Paula Pryke OBE, Florist

For more info, and how to purchase, please visit www.conkerpress.com

Road closed

It has been positively Mediterranean in Suffolk this week.

I have not minded the odd imposed detour on my travels. 

All the better for soaking up the glittering landscape.

“Roadworks” in Suffolk often means that a three kilometre stretch of road is completely barred to 
traffic for a week to enable the methodical filling of a few potholes. 

The upside is that I had to take a diversion on the way to the gym yesterday. 

I discovered a winding lane fringed with barley, ears bent to the tune of the breeze 

and gleaming in the sun on the cusp of the hill.

Welcome to the cow shed

One of the drawbacks of living in the country is getting from a to b. Scant public transport and winding roads can mean a lot of time spent behind the wheel. But I treat this as an opportunity to revel in extraordinary skies, keep abreast of crop rotation and appreciate the richness of East Anglian architecture.

Time permitting, I would also mention that there are glorious surprises in store if one takes a spontaneous trip down a stony drive to investigate one of the many chalked up roadside placards. Sunday was no exception. I had completed my parental taxi duty and it was such lovely evening I decided to take the circuitous route home. I was soaking up the beautiful mackerel sky when I saw a sign that said ‘raw milk fourth left’.

Irresistible. 

It was a long drive.

Keep a troshing??

Norfolk dialect for carry on with the threshing, roughly translated as keep going! I think. 

Anyhow, I kept going. 

Past lawns peppered with geese and peacocks.

To a little wooden shed, with a fridge, an honesty box, and deliciously creamy raw milk, 

straight from the udders of six beloved Jersey cows named after Goddesses.

Yes, I’ll be volunteering for that taxi run every time!

Keep up with the developments @Old Hall Farm, Woodton, on social media, 

there are plans afoot for more local produce in a bigger shed! 

Fragments

"Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole."  Ralph Waldo Emerson

This weekend I barged my way into a lot of borders. I wriggled under prickly raspberry stems to tug out buttercups and squeezed between the black elderflower and a red brick wall, to prise out nettles. I felt cumbersome and clumsy, my giant clodhopping feet pushing plants aside every step. 

But as I became absorbed in my task, and began to piece together the subtle comings and goings of the intricate world I had imposed myself on, I began to feel very humbled and very small.  

Just above my head, the remnants of an old blackbird’s nest were slipping through the vines of the clematis. I remembered last year’s fledglings, beaks relentlessly open. 

Tucked behind the base of the clematis were a heap of empty snail shells, hollow fragments of a passerine feast.

My trowel uncovered a couple of split walnut shells, so that’s where the squirrels hid them.

A broken eggshell, large, pale brown with speckles. A gull's egg?

As if to confirm my suspicions that nature doesn’t depend on a gardener's meddling, even my favourite tulip this year was one that I didn’t plan. A cross-pollination resulted in an exquisite cream and red striped bloom. And in decline, it is still beautiful. 

April

No matter how long the winter, Spring is sure to follow. 

Proverb

The lanes speak for themselves, 

The tenebrous shroud of winter is pierced by blackthorn blossom. 

Green seeps quietly into the thicket while yellow screeches from the horizon. 

I simply watch and wait, 

in wonder.

Welcome to the wild flowers

"Nothing is a better lesson in the knowledge of plants than to sit down in front of them, handle them and look them over just as carefully as possible; and in no way can each study be more pleasantly or conveniently carried on than by taking a light seat to the rock-wall and giving plenty of time to each kind of little plant, examining it closely and asking oneself, and it, why this and why that." Gertrude Jekyll

In my previous post on weeds, I was perhaps a bit harsh in my condemnation, coloured by a long day of filling my barrow with unwanted vegetation. A weed is, after all, merely a wild flower in the wrong place. 

There are plenty of wild flowers that unbidden weave their seductive charm through my garden and I cherish them for that. 
I promise they won't end up in my barrow... unless they get too unruly!

Wonderful weeds

"Weeding is a delightful occupation, especially after summer rain, when the roots come up clear and clean. One gets to know how many and various are the ways of weeds - as many almost as the moods of human creatures. How easy and pleasant to pull up are the soft annuals like Chickweed and Groundsel, and how one looks with respect at deep-rooted things like Docks, that make one go and fetch a spade." 

Gertrude Jekyll

Sadly, I barely had to venture further than a few yards from my back door to gather this assortment of weeds. I would have preferred to boast that I had to search high and low and long and hard to find them. 

Jekyll is right, they are many and various.... and fascinating to observe closely. So many different leaf shapes and growth habits. 

How wonderful is our native British flora... just not in my flower border please! 

The vagaries of March

"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: 

when it is summer in the light and winter in the shade." 

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

....summmery enough for me to skip round the garden to see what's in bloom!

Man with a van...

Someone's pleased it's pancake day!

Country currency

On an ‘out and about’ day recently, I found myself in the pretty centre of Wickham Market. I was mesmerised by the 700-year-old octagonal flint church tower with its soaring lead spire.

More urgently, I was in need of a cash machine. I asked a gentleman who looked as though he had lived in Wickham for a hundred years if there was a Bank nearby. He straightened his stoop, adjusted his cap and looked misty-eyed into the distance. After a long pause, he explained that he had just been trying to calculate whether it was thirty, or forty years ago that the last bank in the village had closed its doors for good.

I thanked him for his time.

Wickham Market, I then discovered, has a distinguished connection with currency. In 2008 one of the largest iron age coin hoards was found in a field near the village totalling 840 pieces of gold. 

So, my elderly friend, there must have been a thriving bank 2000 years ago!

Wrapped up in thoughts of yesteryear, I then called in at nearby Deben Mills. Founded by Mr. Rackham in 1885 as a water-powered mill, his descendants continued to produce stone ground flour until 1970. Still a family run business the mill now trades in coal and animal feeds. Even better, a handwritten sign stuck to the till advertises free bagged horse manure. So I came away with a steaming car boot full, despite still not having any coins in my purse.

That got me thinking, on my way home, about the joys of bartering. The horse manure was destined for my rose bed. The roses I had gained in exchange for a painting. I have been known to provide hot dinners in appreciation for gutter repairs.

Only last week I met an old friend for lunch. She greeted me with an offshoot of a plant I had once admired in her garden and a book that was the casualty of a de-clutter. For her, I had brought homemade chutney and freshly laid eggs. 

For a fleeting moment, I had a vision of myself as an old lady in a market square, wistfully reasoning that I haven’t needed a bank in years!

Happy New Year

I’ve just walked round the garden in the dwindling daylight.
The last fruits of winter have released their grip, making way for the buds of spring.
Bowed heads, sapped of energy, snared by the frost and gloom.
Yet in each shriveled pod and faded petal a shred of beauty lingers.

 

Squirreling away nuts

Walnuts and squirrels are hotly debated topics of conversation in the country. Any advice on how to keep the two apart is gratefully received.

A few years ago we planted two walnut trees but still barely get to enjoy a single nut.

The trees flower and fruit abundantly but I have yet to outwit the squirrels. I could snatch the nuts early on, while they are still green, and pickle them. But what I really want, is the satisfaction of cracking fully fledged, deliciously milky nuts out of their lumpy shells.

This year I tied little net bags around as many nuts as I could reach. But the fluffy tailed thieves merely used the twine as dental floss in preparation for some serious gnawing.

Last year we had one nut, this year I was chuffed to salvage twenty.
By constructing an impassable metal platform under the lower branches of his tree my neighbour, with a competitive glint in his eye, tells me he harvested four hundred and thirty. (Gardeners love to count, I know a man who keeps a tally when deadheading his dahlias!)

Fortunately I can buy as many walnuts as I want for Christmas from Geoffrey who sells his produce at the local farmer’s market. His three trees are forty years old and crop handsomely.

When I ask him about squirrels he simply smiles and says “shoot 'em”.

It's a good day...

...when the autumn sun is bright, 

you take the veg peelings out 

and bump into a little hedgehog who is snuffling through the compost heap. 

"The fox has many tricks.

The hedgehog has but one.

But that is the best of all."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hedgerow adagio

Colour is slowly being wrung from the hedgerows.

As the summer greens fade, coral and carmine briefly dazzle,

then slip in tatters.

Discarded pantomime costumes.

Leaving winter sketched on the horizon.

Salad or soup?

It might be November but on bright days the garden maintains a distinctly summery tempo. The dahlias continue to throw out dazzling blooms and there will be salad for lunch with pickled beetroot.  

 

  

More fitting for November alas, we have bleak days when mist hangs in the air and virtually obliterates the vegetable patch. Out of sight out of mind, I have to make a positive mental note to gather dinner before darkness.

This weekend I pulled up the old beanpoles and prepared the ground for planting garlic. Nothing complicated... just the painstaking removal of a barrow load of buttercups. The ground was well composted in the spring and if my garlic cloves are lucky I’ll remember to add some lime and wood ash.

As a bonus for my efforts, there were a few wizened pods clinging to the beanpoles, from which I rescued perfectly nourishing beans. They’re now squirreled away in the larder for the increasingly frequent days when a hearty soup is really more appropriate than a summer salad.

And what’s more the larder shelf is comfortingly shielded from the elements!

October treasures

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” Henry David Thoreau

 

Idyllic rural retreat for mini-breaks or long term let

Along the lane

The countryside never stands still.
Straw bales have been collected up and loom in great stacks, leaving bleached stubble scrawled across the page.
Ancient hedge boundaries define the landscape, shadowy contours dividing the fields, like the well worn folds of a cherished letter.
Then the plough cuts deep, unfolding a veneer of mahogany and teak.
Resplendent in the pink tinged afternoon light. 

 

To Do or not To Do

It’s a real tonic to put aside the ‘to do’ list once in a while, and take the time to enjoy what someone else has ‘done’. 

With this in mind we visited Somerleyton Hall a couple of weeks ago. Beautiful brick boundary walls, tree lined driveway, fat herbaceous borders, drifts of meadow flowers, clipped yew and picture perfect courtyards. 

The air of tranquility belied the phenomenal amount of effort required to sustain such an inspiring garden.
Until I poked my nose into the cordoned-off greenhouse.
Charmingly dilapidated, I had found the heartbeat of the garden in the unravelled hose, the upturned seed trays and bags of compost... 

...it was the palpable birthplace of those magnificent borders.

So what's on my 'to do' list this weekend? 

Get into the greenhouse and sow some biennials.

Late August

 Morning,

noon, 

and night.

The combine's hum,

draws the harvest home.