MARCH WINDS DO BLOW

Having moaned about the rain in the last blog, come last Sunday morning I looked out of the kitchen window and it was snowing! Long time since it was 20C in February. So we decided to go to Sizergh Castle Gardens, have lunch in the National Trust Cafe and walk the gardens. It hailed and blew and sleeted and snowed and the sun shone intermittently - in fact everything. It is a week of storms - well gales and rain mainly coming with recurrent low pressure systems from the west.

So Gareth came and blew out the lights - well the power went off - and stayed off for just over 20 hours. We learned how to boil a kettle on the woodburner etc etc. The gale blew and the rain came in the roof where the new dormer is going. The garden is full of fallen sticks (which I will have to collect)(as R will not).

I am playing scavenger from the builder's skip - bits of discarded wood and broken slates etc etc. R just shakes her head.

The ducks have, I think, decided not to nest at our pond but at a nearby tarn - they still come for breakfast though.

Down in the veg beds the chives are progressing well and I have put in rows of bay and rosemary cuttings.

 

Outside the kitchen doors the variegated euphorbia is in flower and thriving - as I have said before it is one of R's favourites and a delight on a dark day.

 Thought the garden has many varieties of daffodils and narcissi the wild daffodil - Pseudo narcissus pseudonarcissus - is the best - delicate and beautiful.







Then as I wander the garden I find a surprise - a marigold (calendula).

Now is the time to admit we have been away since Friday, escaping builders, in the north of the county at Wetheral. Anyway we would not have been in the garden on Saturday as it poured with rain causing floods.

We came back, after a rather depressing morning service at Carlisle Cathedral (we were almost the youngest people in a sparse congregation), via the west coast and walked on the vast expanse of Drigg Shore. This is okay as long as you do not look north to the monstrosity that is the Sellafield nuclear processing plant etc.

The feeling of space there is a wonderful and less well known corner of Cumbria and The Lakes.