By ABBIE JURY

I don’t often read the junk mail which clutters up the mailbox but my eye was caught this week by an item on an electronic goods flier. Niles Rock Speakers, it proclaimed. Niles, I assume is the brand. These are outdoor speakers made to look like rocks, with a granite finish.

I am not a fan of piped music in the garden. I don’t want to walk around a garden, my own or anybody else’s, to the strains of music whether it be “The Flight of the Bumblebee”, pan pipes, Hawaiian muzak or anything else. So it has always been a bit of a mystery to me as to why others feel that it enhances one’s enjoyment of a garden. And when it comes to outdoor entertaining, we are more of the ‘wind up the stereo and put the speakers on the window sill’ school of making-do.
Continue reading →

By ABBIE JURY

I was so shocked I had to ring Mark, who was out at the time, and echo a line I had heard him use before. “The winter firewood has arrived,” I told him.

I had been peaceably pottering in my rose garden early last week when I heard a sudden creaking and crashing noise followed by a very loud whoomp. I knew immediately it was a tree falling and hoped in vain that it might be in the neighbour’s. But no, it was one of our old man pines which form the backbone to our avenue gardens.
Continue reading →

By ABBIE JURY

The Christmas New Year statutory holidays see a whole lot of sitting around talking here. Without young children (we are in that hiatus of our own children being adult but no grandchildren showing yet even on distant horizons), this period is more about having unaccustomed leisure.

There is little talk about gardening – the family and friends around us at this time are not gardeners. Just lots of memories and reminiscences and gossip and laughs. And frivolous conversation.
Continue reading →

By ABBIE JURY

I have been thinking about giving plants space to grow. In part, this has come because of the mothers’ gardening diaries which I wrote about in my last column and differing views therein on the matter.

In our garden we have an area we refer to as The Park. It is about four acres, planted out in various trees, both flowering and evergreen, many rhododendrons and assorted other woody plants with mown grass beneath and a meandering stream and ponds. It is very colourful in springtime and restful and green at other times. It has been a deliberate decision by Mark not to plant the stream edge densely but to work on the natural English look and have just occasional drifts of bog plants. This, I might say, only works in our eyes if one is willing to weedeat the grass which goes down to the water edge. A swathe of brown edging caused by using weedkiller instead is definitely not the look we are after.
Continue reading →

By ABBIE JURY

I have been thinking about giving plants space to grow. In part, this has come because of the mothers’ gardening diaries which I wrote about in my last column and differing views therein on the matter.

In our garden we have an area we refer to as The Park. It is about four acres, planted out in various trees, both flowering and evergreen, many rhododendrons and assorted other woody plants with mown grass beneath and a meandering stream and ponds. It is very colourful in springtime and restful and green at other times. It has been a deliberate decision by Mark not to plant the stream edge densely but to work on the natural English look and have just occasional drifts of bog plants. This, I might say, only works in our eyes if one is willing to weedeat the grass which goes down to the water edge. A swathe of brown edging caused by using weedkiller instead is definitely not the look we are after.
Continue reading →