Mothering Sunday and the garden.

Mothers Sunday in the garden.

I’ve just had a great weekend. My grandson came to stay to help out in the garden. He was fantastic, we went grocery shopping yesterday morning and he carried all the bags, loaded them into the taxi, brought them indoors, unpacked the bags and then put all the groceries away. After lunch he started painting the garden fences. Needless to say I’m very impressed. 

He spotted the frogs in the pond. Yep my frogs are back!

First I saw one, then he saw two, which I thought was wonderful because with two frogs we get tadpoles. The grandson was fascinated by the frogs; he kept stopping work to kneel by the water. He wanted to catch them or hold them and wasn’t pleased that I wouldn’t let him. He seemed to think of them as some sort of novel ‘pet’, I don’t think he understood frogs don’t want to be touched. I warned him off because I didn’t want him scaring them away but it’s a bit of a shame how kids these days don’t seem at all in tune with the natural world. 

  Anyway he continued to sit by the pond on his self imposed frog watch and eventually he counted a total of eight frogs all visible at one time. I’m looking forward to a bumper crop of tadpoles later this year. I finally persuaded him to return to painting fences.

While he painted I set about my first tidy up of the year. I’ve removed all the dead foliage from last year, sorted out the strawberries and raked up the dead leaves. 

My garden looks a terrible mess over winter because I leave all the leaves and bits of dead plants rotting where they fall, but it doesn’t seem to do the garden any harm. Once I raked away the debris the snowdrops and daffodils looked a lot better, very cheery. 

I have something pink in flower. I think it’s the Japonica bush I planted a while ago that has, until now, done absolutely nothing. Anyway, what ever it is, and I do think its Japonica, it’s very pretty and has been in flower for a couple of weeks. What a strange time of year for something to blossom.  I seem to remember buying a Japonica bush a long time ago because I once picked quince fruit from a Japonica bush and made extraordinarily delicious jelly. Hopefully, if this is my Japonica bush that I’d forgotten about, and if it’s the right sort of Japonica, I’ll be making quince jelly later in the year.  That’s a lot of ifs and maybes but, I remember that quince jelly being utterly delicious.

These odd little purple flowers have been flowering all winter, even through the winds, frost and ice. Wow………….that’s impressive, brave little flowers.

This morning the grandson finished painting the fences while I did a bit more tidying up and then, we fed the birds. He was a bit noisy in his admiration and considering his excitement, it’s a wonder I managed any photographs at all. But we were visited by a sparrow family and a lone robin and they all hung around long enough for some quick photos.

And then it was time for the rest of the family to visit. It’s mothering Sunday and they bought cards, flowers, cakes, chocolates, wine and box of luxury toiletries.  I feel like a very spoilt mother and granny. 

Spring has arrived.

Spring has arrived.

I was so happy to finally put the paint and brushes back in the shed. By the time finished I’d had enough of emulsion paint for at least another year. After I finished the hall I went on to paint the new handrails on the stairs, then I decided to paint the skirting boards and door frame in the bathroom and then, I repainted all the walls and skirting boards in the kitchen. Once I started painting the kitchen I realised how discoloured it was and how much it desperately needed painting. Anyhow, now that it’s done, it looks so much better, nice and clean and bright and white. Those are not my paintings on the kitchen wall; the landscape is a print I bought from a shop. I saw it, fell in love with the view and promised myself I would go there one day. It’s a place called Riomaggiore which is a tiny medieval village high up on the cliffs above the coast of North West Italy. I bought the print and have kept it on my kitchen wall ever since to remind myself that one day….. I will go there.   The yellow rose on the kitchen wall is a photograph printed on canvas, it was taken by a friend of mine (who is an excellent photographer), she had it printed up on canvas and gave me for Christmas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riomaggiore

And as soon as the decorating paraphernalia was back in the shed, out came the canvas and acrylic paints. I finished off the portrait of Justin, my grandson. He is only 13 but he’s joined the army cadets and goes off to camp every month. He’s very proud of his uniform and made a special point of asking me to make sure I paint the red feathery thingy on his beret (sorry military people can’t remember what he called it).   

Once he was finished I planned my next couple of paintings. I need to do a snowscape of the hills for my daughter, that’s what the long canvas is for, and I plan on doing four small square and two small round canvases of bright yellow sunflowers. Today, I prepared all the canvases and made a start on the snowscape painting. 

Last week was mostly spent saving photos to my flickr account. I’ve finished saving everything from 2014 and I’m up to date with this years photos. Looking back at the flickr account I realise I actually saved every thing quite regularly until about the end of 2010 and then for some reason, I just stopped, and now I’m playing catch up. If you want to see my growing collection of literally thousands of photos they are here;

https://www.flickr.com/photos/forget-me-not5275/

The one time I did venture down to the harbour this week I spotted the inshaw lifeboat crew doing a training exercise and I saw the old dredger was back. That same dredger spends a couple of months here every year which I guess means our harbour is high maintenance.

And lastly…………Its spring, yep its official, my snowdrops are in full bloom which means its spring in my garden. Even if its not spring anywhere else, once the snowdrops bloom, its spring in my garden. Within a couple of weeks I’ll open up my old gardening blog.

I have already booked my grandson, (the one in the painting), to help me paint the garden fences. He’s coming over for the weekend on Friday 13^th and that’s when it will all kick off in my garden.  

Catch up for February 2014

Saturday, 22 February 2014

It’s been a long time, a month or more. The ‘Bobbi’ thing upset me more than I thought but I’m over that now, it was a valuable learning curve and obviously meant to be.
Since then I’ve thrown myself completely into painting. I’ve joined two local art societies and signed on for another term of classes at the college. Both art societies have exhibitions showcasing members artwork later in the year. In fact in total, if I can manage to get all the work done and keep up with every thing, I could have 6 local exhibition opportunities throughout this year. I’ve decided this has to be the year I take painting more seriously. I’m developing more of my own style; I’ve started concentrating of figure painting. I’m using some of my many photos as inspiration. This is the sort of thing I’m doing now, I know I’ve shown some of them before but I quite like seeing them all together, to me it shows some sort of progression. 

The first one is called Red Balloons and Umbrellas; 

Fun in the Sun;  
Jump for Joy;

Red Reflections;

This is what I’m working on now it’s called;
 ‘The painters Granddaughter’. 

I’m actually considering painting over this and starting again because now that I’ve started, I’m not at all sure about the composition. I’m thinking it may be better to miss out a lot of the background, simplify the painting, make the figure bigger and just have her stranding in the field of cabbages without all that other stuff going on in the background. I’m spending a couple of days thinking about it.

 I’m still going down south to see my mum regularly. She’s in her 80’s, generally speaking she has the constitution of an Ox but; she can be quite demanding and she drives my poor sister to distraction. I try to go every second month and my sister who lives in France tries to go in the months when I don’t go. That way at least the sister in England gets a bit of a break every month.
Hopefully I’ll be off to France again in April for my spring visit and this time, I hope to take mum with me for at least the first week. That should give the sister in England a proper break. Our situation is a reflection of the way people live these days. The only reason the care of mum falls on only one of three sisters is a matter of geography and nothing else. Mum plus the youngest sister live in the same village in England, I live in Scotland and the other sister lives in France. It all seems so unfair on the sister left to look after mum but I guess it must happen in a lot of families these days.
On a brighter note, and I still can’t believe my luck, while visiting mum last week, she suddenly said I could have her overlocking machine. WOW….. thanks mum, that’s fantastic. It’s a wonderful little machine but very modern and quite lightweight. I posted it to myself just before I left and it arrived perfectly intact a couple of days later. Quite apart for the value in dressmaking and general sewing, I’m already planning on doing some fabric art with the help of this little machine. I’m not at all sure when I’ll get time for fabric art but at least I know when the time does arrive, I have the equipment.

And while I’m on the subject of family……………what do you think of this?? 

Believe it or not this is my 12 year old grandson. He is so proud, he joined the cadets and he loves it. This is him in his very first uniform. I did have some reservations when I was told he wanted to join but; now that I’ve thought about it, joining the cadets is so much better than lots of other things lads of his age get involved in.

I think spring is almost here, I keep seeing little signs, lots of the trees are in bud and the snowdrops are up in the garden. Soon it will be time to get out there and tidy up the garden.

Every thing is still too wet to do anything out there but soon……..it will be time. I’m hoping the garden dries out sufficient for me to do what needs doing before I go off the France for a month. I made a strategic decision not to invest so much time and energy in the garden this year; I want to concentrate on painting. But every garden needs a little bit of TLC at the end of winter.
Well……………I think that’s it for now. I’ve been sat here tap tapping away for a while now and  think I’ve finally ran out of things to say, maybe I won’t leave it so long next time.