Garden visiting .... and the snow stayed away

I am pleased to say our friends, Bill and Kaye, visited us yesterday.

We had a lovely afternoon visiting former Gardener’s World presenter, the late Geoff Hamilton’s Rutland garden, Barnsdale. I’d like to have a bubbling fountain like this in our garden.

As you can see, there’s no snow on the ground (for a change). Even the rain held off. The weather was overcast but mild and still, just right for garden visiting.

Bill and Kaye are amongst our oldest friends .... in terms of how long we’ve known them, not their ages! Here they are still acting like teenagers.

That’s better!

This bench looks pretty with plants underneath, we have one like this in our garden, must plant around it. Barnsdale is full of ideas and inspiration.

I like the rusty grill on this ... erm ... not sure what it is, but I like it.

Topiary spirals here are beautiful, I won’t tell you what MTM said their shape reminded him of.

These quite tall white plants were in a semi-shaded area, I'm thinking they would look nice in our garden too.

Bill checking out the bee hive compost bins. Got lots of old pallets we could use to make some like these. 

MTM isn’t showing his age here. The huge smile was down to being absolutely delighted to get a quid concession off the entrance price. The rest of us were far too young to qualify. 

Lovely paviors

Concentric circles of pipe ends make a texturally interesting centrepiece for this circular paving.

A huge mop of black grass, we have two smaller specimens in our garden, the foliage looks stunning with this sedum and heather, contrasts beautifully..

Toadstools, a bee hotel and smoke breathing dragon under the bridge.

The catkins on this tortured tree looks amazing against the red dogwood stems, photo doesn’t do it justice.

Barnsdale’s floral display confirms Spring has definitely and finally arrived. Earlier when we were showing Bill and Kaye our garden (still very much under development) we spotted a big dead tree branch that the river had deposited on the bank. Bill suggested such driftwood gifts from the Witham could contribute towards a nice triangular bed like this ... good idea! 

We have lots of plain leaved arum growing wild in our garden, the lighter veining on this variety is very special, I must try to get hold of some.

Paved path with mixed materials.

We came home with a souvenir plant courtesy of Bill and Kaye’s generosity, couldn’t resist the startling colour of this primrose.

Dinner at our house,  bœuf bourguignon cooked by MTM rounded off a super day. We must do it again soon.

Across the County line

Where we currently live, a few miles South of Grantham and only a couple of miles from the A1, we're just inside Lincolnshire.

By travelling only a few miles though, we can be in one of four other counties very quickly. If we go West, we'd be in Leicestershire. South, we'd be in Cambridgeshire (where I grew up and spent a lot of my life). If we go South-West we'd be in Northamptonshire or the small County of Rutland.

And now I reach the point of today's blogging - we are moving house very shortly to a village close to Oakham in Rutland. We're renting the cottage where we currently live and due to circumstances I won't repeat here, we have to continue renting for at least another year. We do want to buy another house and settle down again but our house close to Cambridge just can't be sold for a while. We only ever intended to be in this cottage for a short term tenancy of 6 months maximum. There are some things that aren't ideal for us about it and so after a rent increase, we decided to move on.

We've found a four bedroomed house (we have three at the moment) which has been fairly recently built but in an old style (which we like), we've filled in the paperwork and paid our deposit for the Agent to go through the reference checking procedure. Fingers crossed everything should be OK, our circumstances haven't changed much since we last had them done 3 years ago ....

So, we're hopefully on the move and this is why blogging has been a little sporadic, we've been clearing out cupboards and getting ready to move. It's surprising how much clutter you acquire in only 3 years! I'm feeeling quite excited now, the new house has several advantages over where we are now so if it doesn't happen, I think I'll be disapointed.

The new village has got a post office just down the road (easier for my mail order beads, most of my customers are overseas), a smaller and easier to manage garden, spacious hot working area for beadmaking and soldering in an outbuilding overlooking garden, log burner (to keep the caveman in DH happy-he likes making fire!) Both of us will have a double bedroom at the top of the house (its three stories) to use for work and so the mess and clutter of computers and my beading can be out of the way when we have visitors. The downstairs two floors are then our usual living and entertaining rooms. There are lots more dog walks locally without getting into the car as well so even Missy will like this new place better! There's also a bit of a bonus in that the new house is a few miles closer to Cambridge for my Saturday excursions to the craft market to sell my jewellery.

If all goes as planned, we should be on our way during the last week of October so if I'm a bit quiet, you know why!