Month: January 2020

Making January: The Beginnings of a New Fleet

I’ve made fifteen more boats. I’m using Ann Wood’s pattern, which I first tried out last November. She said the boats were best made in batches and this works for me too. I do them in batches of three or four so I can get on with something while I’m waiting for the paint/glue to dry.

For years I have saved snippets from newspapers and the collection increased rapidly when I started making papier mâché as I now save any interesting words, phrases or pictures I come across while tearing the strips. Again, following Ann Wood’s inspiration, I planned to use the words on boats. They didn’t fit on the little bunting boats but they are perfect for these larger paper ones. Each sail is painted on the front and has a word or phrase on the back – not exactly a name but something that suits the boat.

I’m not sure where the eventual fleet will hang, possibly from the kitchen ceiling. At the moment they are moored to my bookshelves. I like to think that at night, after I have turned out the lights and gone to bed, they slip their moorings under the books and sail away on adventures. Wherever they go, they are always back in their literary harbour by morning.

Jane

Each Month From my Window: January

Last month I bemoaned the fact that the best photographs of gardens in winter were usually photos of beautiful or evocative weather conditions. Of course it helps to have a good basic structure but I’m sure this is often easier on a larger scale. Monty Don’s front garden consists of 26 yews cut into cones of differing sizes and, while I don’t know the exact dimensions of this part of his garden, I suspect it is probably eight or even ten times the size of my entire plot. They achieve a beauty throughout the winter that my half-empty pots are never going to match. The following extract comes from Gardening at Longmeadow and describes looking out onto the garden at 2.30 on a February morning in 2002:

‘A breeze rippled the dark like a river and the silvery monochrome stripped away everything but shape from the yews. Twenty-six cones, each different but for that moment each perfect and each with its shadow like an echo……. It felt like a door had opened and shown me a parallel garden in another dimension.’

Much as I love the grasses in my front window boxes, they have some way to go before they will conjure up this level of magic.

But my bulbs are starting to appear and, with a judicious rearrangement of pots, I can see them as I write. The winter jasmine is still flowering merrily and, this morning, I spotted the first witch hazel flowers from the kitchen window.

Most of the photos are, I have to admit, a bit of a cheat. I see the plants from my window but I can blot out the parked cars, neighbouring houses and less-than-spectacular surrounding plants, which a photograph can’t. So, to misquote Eric Morecambe’s famous statement to the unfortunate Andrew Preview, ‘These are all the right plants, just not necessarily viewed from the right angle’.   

Jane

Making Week 25: Cushions and Not-New-Year’s Resolutions

Patchwork has got me through the last few weeks of ‘making’ and resulted in a couple of robust cushions that will make the uncomfortable garden bench positively cosy.

I have never been good at keeping New Year’s resolutions so, when I started the weekly making project back in July I deliberately decided on 25 weeks as I knew it would get me safely past the crucial time of making unsuccessful resolutions.

In fact I made a series of ‘resolutions’ on 22nd December and fine-tuned them on Twelfth Night. As far as I am concerned, once the winter solstice is passed it is a gentle slope all the way to summer: bright sunny mornings, long twilight evenings and meals in the garden.

Having roughly got the hang of papier mâché and put my patchwork fabrics into some sort of order my plan is to complete things this year. First the remaining fifty boats. Then the partly-made castle, the planned patchworks and a host of other things that are at the ‘to be started/finished very soon’ stages. I am planning to set aside one day each week for making, and ideally finishing, things. I’ll post them once a month to balance the garden posts, which I’m going to alter slightly this year.  

Roy Lancaster has started a new series in The Garden, the Royal Horticultural Society’s monthly magazine, called Through my Window. I spend a considerable time looking out of the window, both intentionally and when I am meant to be working. Unlike his, my garden is tiny and, also probably unlike him, I do very little actual gardening between October and March. The lack of space means I can’t rely on trees to provide year-round interest and the same lack means I can’t afford much space for ‘winter-interest’ plants. Summer is when I spend most time in the garden (gardening and sitting) so it is then that most of my plants need to look their best. But I look out of my windows all year and I’m convinced that I always have something, however small, to look at. The following posts will see if this is true. For the moment here are some wafty grasses, winter jasmine flowers and someone who knows she is not meant to trample through the window boxes.

Jane

Childish in Chalks?

Occasionally one produces something that bears no relation to one’s intentions. A few weeks ago I decided to use chalks on blue paper for two poses of our faithful model, Kathryn. What I’d hoped to do  was obtain a few delicate flesh tones. What actually happened was the brightly coloured chalks produced an effect like a small boy’s vision of a naked lady before the age of the internet. It was strangely successful, without having any pretensions to art, although I have a curious feeling that Prince Andrew might refer to it as “a harmless bit of fun”. 

Chris