Never never again for dear old Ctenanthe…

I always thought of Ctenanthe’s leaves as pink and brown…

This is just a short post to pay tribute to a house plant I have lost. Her name was Ctenanthe, pronounced Tee-nanth-ee. I say “her” because that sound’s like a lovely woman’s name to me…

In fact

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To the Celtic Manor borne…

The old part of the Celtic Manor…

Yes, I do mean borne, not born – by taxi, actually. There and back for a Saturday-night sleepover after a family birthday party. It was a lovely interlude. But this isn’t Facebook, so I won’t go into the details of the party itself – suffice to say it was brilliant!

This post is about the Celtic Manor, with some pictures I took on the sunny Sunday morning. Maybe you’ve heard of the Celtic Manor? It is near Newport in South East Wales and was the

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Upton House – captive flowers and wild fowl

Upton House in Poole, Dorset – now the setting for a small country park

My childhood holidays in the late 1950s and 1960s were spent in Upton, a suburb on the northern edge of Poole in Dorset. My mother was born in Poole and Upton was where her mother and sister still lived in those days.

But Upton House was unknown to me until a few years ago, as it was in private hands. In fact my cousin now tells me that when she was little the local lady of the Upton manor would go around distributing largesse to poor families like ours!

In this blog post I intended just to show the pictures I took of the lovely flowers in the walled garden and some of the wildfowl you can see from the shore at the bottom of the garden, but

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September garden snapshots…

Sunny Rudbeckia Tiger Eye Gold, still in its pot, having been bought in August…

Although I still have a couple of summer trips from Dorset and West Wales left to share, I thought it was time to put on record what has been going on in my own garden, too.

This time last year we were having a heatwave in the UK, but this September has

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