Thursday, 2 February 2023
at home
I continued planting, mostly perennials today instead of shrubs, from Secret Garden Growers. I hope the weather doesn’t change back to freezing nights. It very well might not. If it does, I might be out covering these with pots.

The gold saxifrage went into the new deep path end bed, bottom centre.

A golden brunnera went by the rhododendron path. It and some others will need an application of Sluggo.


I put a new primula by the new bridge.


And another new primula by the deep swale.


I wonder if I will regret this plant:

I put it here, where it won’t interfere with anything delicate.

A new to me grass went into the bed that borders the north side of the Deep Path.


That’s just around the corner from this view…

I finished out the daylight with some very focused weeding, including the center bed.


Allan made me a new garbage can lid planter.

In the evening, I read the first of Derek Tangle’s Minak Chronicles, memoirs about leaving a sparkling high society city life for a flower farm, off the grid, in Cornwall. I have three paperbacks that I bought in a used book store in the early 80s, before it was easy to look up what order the books were published in. And I have now learned there are 19 or 20 in the series which appeared from 1961-1996! So I’m getting the first two through interlibrary loan but may buy the rest. I have the third one from my decades old purchase.

It was simply wonderful. I want to read them one after another but must wait for the second to arrive. (The only regrettable thing is that this American edition is edited to replace pounds with dollars, as if Americans of 1961 had to be coddled that way.)
This passage reminds me a bit of Ilwaco, which, compared to Long Beach, is more of a community than a strident tourist town.

The Lizard Peninsula was home to many flower farms.

This passage happened to Robert and me when we vacationed here in 1991. We fell in love with the Long Beach Peninsula, and a bartender at the Heron and Beaver pub was one of the locals we talked to about moving here.


He told us his story of moving to Seaview with $100 to his name, into a house with no hot running water and holes in the roof. (Housing was different here back then, and even places with solid roofs were affordable.) We made an offer on a house in Ocean Park but it fell through (the seller went out fishing and while at sea, he changed his mind). Due to various unfortunate health problems, it took another year before we arrived…and then we had to prove that we were serious and meant to stay. Even now, locals say that newcomers tend to leave after just one stormy winter.

Oh, how very much I relate to this story of ditch digging on the new property!

Even though we did not live off the grid, our 360 square foot cold and leaky little shack was a challenge.
When I reached this passage, and another in which Derek and his wife Jeannie go to a pub in the village of Mousehole, I realized I had been so very close to their house in 1975. I had been to Mousehole and to the Merry Maidens!

Their cottage was near Lamorna Wink on this map.


What a thrill to realise this. Cornwall is my ancestral home, and distant cousins on my father’s side had taken me on tour of the area that day.
In other entertainment news, we’ve been watching the mystery series Endeavour at night, and last week we followed it with a British comedy series called Miranda, which I loved so much that I moped around the garden sadly the day after we finished it. I will miss her! Nature loving friends might join us in viewing Winterwatch which, if you don’t have Britbiox, you can find here.