Happy New Year...

and lazy days...

If they didn’t chatter so much, you’d never know they were there! Rainbow Lorikeets in the Agave flowers…

Do you, like me, have a stack of open emails on your desktop, filed one-on-top-of-the-other in the bottom left hand corner…with just their pale-grey ‘headers’ visible enough to click on for retrieval? (Perhaps that’s where these ones of mine to you find themselves!). There they sit, awaiting an idle moment when there’s time to attend to them…those we really want to read, follow their links and tumble head-first into a never-ending warren of discovery. But if we close them they’ll be lost forever! Clearing up the lap-top desk top, is on my list of ‘must get-to’s, though I don’t quite feel ready for it - not yet.

For me, those emails that demand an urgent response climb their way up to the top left-hand corner most days (and are not so tightly packed together!). But oh dear the bottom left-hand corner can build to such an extent, they’re often out of date by the time I get to them. Rather like the real-life collection that sits on the right of my actual desk. Last year in a moment of vexation, when the real-life pile toppled over, I brought in a little stool from the Barn and set half the pile on top of it for better balance…and there it sits: now there are two piles to sort through! But therein somewhere, lie the clues to this year ahead.

Beckoning through the bedroom window and flyscreen before I click the shutters closed for the day…

But all of that is for next week…because this week I still have one toe in idleness. It won’t last long. Already I can feel my fingers itching to pick up the secateurs and here I am tip-tapping to you in some kind of precursor to what will follow! How (during the course of the year) I yearn for these lazy days…often wishing I could nestle into my chair on the front verandah as I click the shutters closed and water the pots between the wings on those hot summer mornings outside of this celebratory period, to lose myself in the pages of a book. Which I do…at this moment in the year. All those peeps who tell me I must go slower can rest assured that I do indeed take the opportunity. I’m very good an indulging…perhaps alarmingly so, but just in small doses! Good at ‘just being’…staring into space, up at the sky, cloud watching, wave watching, plants rippling-in-the-breeze watching…mind vacant. I’ve been so since early childhood. It is perhaps, my favourite way of being.

But if one was like that all the time, then nothing would ever be achieved! It’s no way to inspire anyone else, to bring peeps together, to share ideas, thoughts, creativity. And my garden is not going to grow untended (well, not as intended anyway!).

Although I’m really not a ‘driven’ kind of human…once I have an idea…that very grain of a thought is inclined to take me on a merry dance as I pursue it to the end, leaving no stone unturned and applying every measure and effort required as best I can, to bring it to fruition. So therein lies the drive…born out of necessity but also a desire for real productivity and the reassuring results of well-intentioned effort spent.

But mostly I have to contain the ideas as they are bigger than me, which I find very frustrating. Really…life would be easier if I just took to staring at the sky for longer periods of time instead of filling my head with thoughts, ideas, words and possibility.

A peaceful section of the Arc that isn’t yet nagging me into action! The pale blue spires of bog sage Salvia uliginosa and russet tones of a collapsing plume poppy Macleaya cordata…

At this time of year…when all seems spent, done, wrapped and finished…truly…a kind of ‘no idea what happens next’ is my usual frame of mind on December 31. But a short time of rest is all it takes to reignite, reimagine. There are now just a very few scribbles on a sheet of paper to the right of my laptop. Into what they will evolve I have no idea. They are bigger than me (though not as big as some, that I’ve had to realise over the last year are simply never going to occur…). I often feel I’m going round in circles and it takes time to unlock the potential of any idea…time to dwell, to ponder. None are fully formed and all will require collaboration. They come with an air of uncertainty…the atmosphere of January.

The dark-stemmed Pineapple Lily Eucomis comosa has surprisingly delighted with flower spikes two years in a row…it’s meant to be a biennial event but I’m thrilled they’ve arrived!

And so it’s on that note, that this post is uncommonly short. Because I have one toe still quite determined to exploit every moment of a lazy day and the other twitching towards the accelerator. But with so much more yet to read (not that that necessarily resolves anything…indeed it’s inclined to promote further questioning, while also underpinning, underscoring and colouring my own peculiar way of viewing the world).

When I was given a copy by Potts Point Bookshop as a ‘thank you’ for my conversation with Paul Bangay in October I couldn’t have been more thrilled….I’d spied it at the RA when hovering at the Summer Exhibition but decided against lugging it back in my suitcase and hadn’t yet got around to picking a copy up!

Last week I mentioned I’d very happily ploughed through ‘Citrus, A World History’ (David Mabberley) and since I’ve read cover to cover, every one of Ben Pentreath’s excellent words explaining twenty years of masterplanning, design and architectural practice in ‘An English Vision’ (and drooled over every glorious image!). Now I’ve read all but the final chapters of Olivia Laing’s ‘The Garden Against Time…in search of a common paradise’ and how I encourage you to pick up a copy too. Perhaps as three they make for peculiar bedfellows, yet they topple over each other quite eloquently and have certainly had me absorbed in their pages, each locking time, history, place and mankind’s never-ending pursuits into a passage that continues with each and every passing day.

With all my wishes for this brand new year…which I hope will be fulfilling for you in every way.

Mickey x

ps if you usually don’t bother beyond this point…I couldn’t resist adding a couple of images to the garden notes below!

Productive garden notes:

Eating from the garden:

Potatoes, onions, garlic, cucumbers. Just a little coloured chard, lettuce, rocket (a bit leathery now but still a good pungent addition of a few leaves to a salad), lovage, fennel fronds, mint, rosemary, thyme, chives. Fresh fennel seed, fennel pollen and basil. There’s a bit of a hungry gap now, though I spy the first aubergine swelling beautifully and the first tomatoes have set tiny fruit but they’re still a way off. As I said last week…we should be eating beans!

Going / gone: Leaf amaranth (too big…time to leave it to grow to its enormous mature size and flower), fennel fronds (too old now and withering in the heat)

Seed saving: none

Sowing: none (but if you feel inclined to grow your brassica family from seed, then now is the time to sow into punnets!)

Planting: none

Jude the Obscure is anything but at the moment!

Ornamental garden notes:

Picking for the house: my huge Christmas arrangement was a source of enormous joy and I’ve only just tossed it into the compost! I’m on thrice daily frangipani collection and there are many roses in the field. This week yielded three magnolias!

Collection pre-swim…no doubt more will fall before my laps are done!

Perfumes and aromas: the frangipanis reign! The air is infused with their waxy, balmy perfume and nowhere is its presence more intoxicating than upon opening the stable door to the pool, where that semi-open building traps its scent, holding and amplifying it in the heat of the day and into the evening, when we’re inclined to swim a few laps with the last rays of the sun. There’s a lovely hint of fig leaf on the breeze to mingle with the frangipani and…on New Year’s night, the first near invisible flowers of night-scented jessamine Cestrum nocturnum opened, to cast waves of their beguiling perfume across the verandah as slowly the stars above began to reveal themselves and twinkle in a clear, velvet sky. If I walk via the Dairy, the last of the Buddleja blooms still spill their honey aroma, and the Murraya hedge is speckled once again with flowers. As I rolled the hose at the end of the Border midweek, a lemony scent of such intensity reached my nose, but I couldn’t locate its whereabouts anywhere in the vicinity. I trudged up to Mrs R’s to move a sprinkler and there at the courtyard what did I spy? Three Magnolia flowers set high up in the brown undercarriage of leaves. Somehow, their very essence had trickled all the way down, across the Elm Lawn, the Oleander hedge, through the tight opening of the Murraya hedge and flooded the air in the Borders. It was exquisite! Of course I had to find a way to reach them and bring them inside!

Three individual Magnolias heading to various spots around the house and I couldn’t resist picking a Cottonwood Hibiscus in easy reach…its colour transformed to a sunset copper by day’s end…

Pruning and other: Despite my best efforts to not do anything at all (except water!)…I did some tying up…some mulching where I’d sown seeds and so therefore had not added mulch earlier - ie the corn square and around some of the beans; and deadheaded the roses in the field which have been producing beautiful blooms. Oh but I don’t think I can delay much longer….there’s a tipping point and I think it’s arrived!