Tag Archives: Barnsdale

More Barnsdale

Posted on by
4

Barnsdale

Here we are back at Barnsdale and I hope you can see the butterflies enjoying the flowers. I must admit though that I’m not ever going to plant any buddleias in the future, no matter how much they’re enjoyed by butterflies, as they’re such a menace to buildings with their habit of germinating in stonework.

Barnsdale

I think the flowers below are perovskia and agapanthus as well as some sort of huge thistle. For some reason my agapanthus didn’t flower at all, fingers crossed for next summer.

Barnsdale

Acanthus is the main flower below, or you might know it by its common name – Bear’s breeches. These spiky leaves were often used in designs in Victorian times, in fact the cornicing on the ceiling in our old house was acanthus leaves. They also feature on the top of some Victorian pillar/post boxes which I didn’t realise until Valerie in NZ mentioned it in a comment.

Barnsdale

As you can see below, some of the box hedges have been scarred by box blight, but it looks like they’ll recover. I love the rambling rose but have no idea what it’s called.

Barnsdale

As the trees in my neighbourhood are beginning to change colour it’s good to be able to look back at what was the height of summer when these photos were taken.

Back Home

Posted on by
6

We went on another British road trip last week and I managed to be organised enough to schedule some posts to be published while I was away, just in case I didn’t have access to the internet. It turned out that I didn’t feel much like being online anyway, I was too tired as usual, what with running around during the day.

We visited mainly places which we hadn’t visited before. It’s sad but true that I enjoy visiting places in the UK which I’ve heard about, mainly on the TV or radio – often just on road traffic reports, and I wonder what they’re like if I’ve not visited them.

So now I can envisage Wigan, Haydock, Biddulph Gardens, Buxton, Alcester, Blenheim Palace (Woodstock and Bladon) Geddington, Market Harborough, Geoff Hamilton’s Garden at Barnsdale (Rutland), Uppingham, Oakham, Wetherby, Northallerton, Mount Grace Priory, Sedgefield, Washington Village, Morpeth, Rothbury, Cragside and Wooler. The only places we had visited before were Alcester, Blenheim/Woodstock, Morpeth, Cragside and Wooler.

This time we started off driving down south via Moffat in the Scottish Borders. The bookshop was open and I bought two books –
1. Murder Among Friends by Elizabeth Ferrars
2. Crazy Pavements by Beverley Nichols

It was a bookish beginning to our break, we were heading for Wigan, an unlikely place to visit but as I had just read George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier I was intrigued to find out what it was like now. It has a newish shopping mall but you can tell from the older buildings that Wigan was indeed down at heel in the 1930s. Unlike many places, mainly down south, there was virtually nothing in the way of art deco/1930s buildings. From which I assume that nobody was doing any building at that time, it was a very depressed area. It’s not exactly vibrant at the moment but it’s still an awful lot better than Kirkcaldy, my nearest large town, which seems to have yet another empty shop each time I visit it.

We stopped off at Buxton, mainly because it was a Georgian spa town and has associations with Jane Austen.

Sedgefield was chosen as an overnight visit mainly because it was Tony Blair’s constituency when he was an MP and I wanted to compare it with Kirkcaldy. In the end I didn’t even take any photos there as it was such a wee place with just a few shops, a village really. I feel quite unreasonably aggrieved with the inhabitants of Sedgefield for voting in Tony Blair as their MP and allowing Blair to set off on his egomaniacal merry power binge which has put us in the horrendous position we are in now.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to over the last week or so and I plan to show you some photos of the various places which I hope you might be quite interested to see.

What did I buy when I was away? Not a lot really, apart from some more books, but that’s another blogpost.