The storage issue I’m currently battling with is right here, in front of me: it’s my computer’s refusal to add to the 13,000-odd photographs I’ve stuffed onto it. It seems that all the photographs I’ve taken with my new camera are too large. Last week I finally changed the setting, but it was too little too late, and these re-sized photographs have nowhere to go. The most frustrating thing of all is that I’ve been here before: last year iPhoto went  bonkers and at one point we thought all our photographs had been corrupted. It took weeks to sort out. Joe installed an external hard drive – the computing equivalent of a nifty Ikea shelving unit – only now I’ve filled that up too.

The fact is the computer can take no more. It is, in Mac terms, pretty ancient
and its operating system is not compatible with any of the brilliant online album and book-making packages, any one of  which would deal with the problem rather neatly.
So for the last few days I’ve been sorting through photographs dating back ten years or so, again, editing ruthlessly, again, trying to create more space, but progress is slow.

I hope to have the problem sorted soon, but for now here is half of half term. The half in which the girls painted and I watched the latest wave of bulbs.

The other half of half term – the lovely circular walk from Bibury, the amble around Ashton Court and all the other bulbs will have to wait until I’ve made room for them.

Last week it was Joe’s birthday and we had some friends over for the evening – the perfect excuse to indulge myself. The tulips are now a week old, but still going strong.

I’ve changed the water and cut the stems several times, which seems to have kept them looking good. I imagine that the final, flamboyant collapse, which I love as much as the initial opening of the flowers, will occur some time next week. Not bad at £2 a bunch.

Although I’ve managed to extract a little bit of homegrown something from the garden  throughout the last couple of months, the pleasure of lone blooms, artfully arranged twigs and bunches of ivy snaffled from various derelict plots in the neighbourhood is wearing thin. This need for a colour-fix and some substantial cut stems is proof to me, if it were needed, that our garden is sorely lacking at this time of year. Naomi’s excellent post relating to scent as well as colour in the garden throughout the year has got me thinking about how I might rectify the situation for next year. Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’is on my list – my sister has it in her garden, and she and I cut some branches back in January which not only looked wonderful but filled her house with delicious perfume.

In the meantime, I’m grateful for the supermarket and street market bunches.

In a perfect world I think we could all have done with a slightly heavier snow fall.

But it seems that even a thin blanket of the white stuff exerts a certain magic: all three girls were out of bed and ready for breakfast by 7am. Unheard of on a school day.

And like the rest of the family, Sybil loves it too. Shame it’s all gone.

And to add insult to injury, every now and then the sun decides to put in an appearance. All of which is hugely frustrating for Matilda. But I quite enjoy the fleeting sunshine, especially when the back of the house is bathed in a strange golden light, and the walls of kitchen and garden are filled with wonderful shadows.

I think this makes up for the lack of snow. But it’s not good enough for Matilda,
who, although having only experienced two properly white winters in her life, has
come to regard snow as a given for this time of year. Her fingers are firmly crossed
for a snowy half term. And I have to admit, mine are too.

She seems to have accepted that the doll is not “achly” alive.

The scent of Hyacinth is difficult to pin down: the green, sappy aroma of cut grass one minute, slightly earthy the next, and in the background, a constant sweetness. As always I am kicking myself for not having ordered more – though I was clever enough to stagger their planting, so there is another batch still waiting in the wings.

In the study I have been distracted by the flamboyant performance of this unnamed Hippeastrum. It made me think of a fan dance, as one by one the flowers unfurled. It has been quite extraordinary to watch and I don’t know why I haven’t bothered with them before. This one was saved from the basement of our local Ikea, which is why I have no idea about its true identity, though I must add that the label said Amaryllis, as do all the ones in the supermarkets, and I guess it’s a bit like the whole geranium/pelargonium thing. Next year there will be more. I want a forest of them on the mantelpiece.

On the kitchen window sill I have more Hyacinths, and several pots of Narcissus Tete a Tete all about to work their magic. I can almost be persuaded that there is no need to go outside at all. Except that we live in a house with an amazing view across the city, so I am always drawn to the windows, which makes the mud-fest, that at other times of the year passes for a garden, difficult to ignore. Below is the photograph of the garden as it is now.

And I have to say, it makes my heart sink. The pots, though filled with bulbs, look awful. The  stone terrace is bleak and the paths a total mess. The thing that strikes me most forcefully about the garden at the moment is the way that the bare boundary fences and trellis are forced to take centre stage. Part of this is simply that new trellis went up in the autumn and plants have yet to colonise it. But it’s also because  there is nothing else out there to draw the eye – most of last year’s planting consisted of herbaceous perennials which have died back for the winter. I can see a few of my new, self-seeded Euphorbias bulking up nicely, so I know that by this time next year it will look very different. I also have plans for more evergreen and semi-evergreen climbers such as aSolanum jasminoides ‘Album’ and Akebia quinata, both of which I grew in my garden in Peckham, and proved invaluable.

The other problem is that the design of the garden, as far as it goes, is really not much more than a path through wide’ish beds leading to the bottom of the garden. And at the moment, the bottom of the garden is not a place I particularly want to visit. I didn’t bother planting any shrubs there as I know that more landscaping is required – it seemed pointless to spend money on shrubs which might need moving so soon after planting. But in the autumn I stuffed the beds with spring bulbs, so although they appear empty now, things should start to improve in a month or two. I am aware that my tone might seem a little gloomy, but really I’m fine about it – gardens are never finished, they remain works in progress, they have their peaks and troughs. My garden is simply in a trough, and better to have the trough now – outside it is currently sleeting – than in July.

Several years on, and now a dog owner, I find that I am in the same slightly gloomy park on an almost daily basis (I must add here that Sybil does get walked elsewhere, but time is limited at the moment, and a local walk is all we can manage). Given my initial feelings about the park, you’d think this would be a recipe for utter misery and boredom on my part, but curiously, for such a small place, there is always something new to see.

Over the last two weeks snowdrops have been emerging, first one small cluster and now great clumps light up an otherwise dull corner. The crocuses have also started popping up: brilliant flashes of electric yellow and purple along the muddy banks. And although the trees are still leafless and skeletal, there have been some interesting additions: this kite, lit up by the sun, caught my eye the other day.

And at the weekend I could hardly fail to spot this spectacular bit of yarn-bombing.

Recently, I came across a whole group of photos that I took last July when the trees were covered with ribbons in advance of an annual arts festival. Sadly, we weren’t around for the actual festival and I guess that’s why I never got round to posting these photos.

 As I’ve said, St Andrew’s park is not particularly large, or even especially pretty, but I love it more and more, and clearly I am not alone.

Although not difficult to make, marmalade does take time. Quite a long time. I always end up with my oranges sitting around for a week or so because one way and another, I never seem to have quite the right amount of time for the task. But this morning I realised that beyond a quick circuit of the park with Sybil, the day was mine.

This batch needed only the one furious fifteen minute boil before it reached setting point. A record, I think. I usually get through several frozen saucers before I get a set.

I keep meaning to experiment with different recipes but I never get round to it, so once again I have used Delia’s recipe – which I’ll dig out later and post if anyone wants it. The jars are mostly ones I re-use each year, but my mum recently gave me a collection of lovely vintage preserving jars from France – the big ones without lids in the photograph below. They are incredibly chunky and the glass is slightly hazy when they are empty.

For some reason, and I may be alone in this, I derive enormous pleasure from finding that, by chance, I have exactly the right number of jars for the amount of marmalade I’ve made. I get the same pleasure when I manage to hit exactly £40 or £50 when I fill the car with petrol. Once or twice I have been moved to point this out to the attendant when paying. I obviously don’t get out enough.

PS thank you so much for all the lovely comments on my last post – part two to follow soon.

But there are signs of life here and there: new shoots pushing valiantly through the mud, fresh buds on the shrubs and the early flowering clematis, so I am forcing myself to draw up plans and make lists. And trawling through the photographs I took last year shows me that even if my plans are pretty minimal, the garden will do what all gardens do, even half abandoned ones: it will grow, bulk up, fill out, knit together and at times look very lovely indeed. At least that’s what it did last year, as you’ll see from the photographs below, the first of which was taken at the end of April, and the last in mid-September.

I think it’s vital to keep a photographic record of a garden’s progress. If nothing else, the  photographs will give you the impetus to get out in the worst weather to tackle boring jobs such as cutting back the Buddleja, or securing dangling vine wires, before it’s too late. It is also satisfying to see how far you’ve come and how much the garden has changed. And, possibly more important than all of that, photographs serve as a valuable reminder that gardens are in a constant state of flux – they change with the seasons, appearing fresh and newly minted one day, jungly and abundant the next, and then suddenly, or so it can seem, it’s all gone to seed and the show is over for another year.

I can’t quite bring myself to post the photograph of the garden as it is today – too grim. But I will, when I write part II of this post – some time next week, I hope. For now I am going back to my catalogues and my rather long wanted list.

The girls are being a little trying at the moment. Although it’s only been a week or so since they went back to school, the fact is they’re still tired. Christmas is never really much of a holiday is it? Not in the rest sense anyway. So they are grey-faced, grumpy, and would rather be hibernating. Feet stamp, eyes roll, doors slam and voices are raised. But I’ve discovered something quite remarkable: they’ll do virtually anything for a gold coin.

Not a shiny, golden one pound coin, but a cheap as chips chocolate coin in a foil wrapper. The kind that cost £1 for twenty, and taste like chocolate flavoured wax crayons. I found several net bags of these hidden in a drawer, obviously left over from Christmas. I am eeking out the stash as I’m not sure if they are still in the shops – maybe they’re available all year round, I don’t know. Anyway, they are offered in exchange for various things: getting out of bed quickly, eating the vile poison that I’ve served up in place of supper, taking abandoned coats and shoes to their rightful homes and so on.

I use them sparingly, only once a day, and their effect is nothing short of magical.
They live in this over the top Victorian sugar bowl, which seems to add to their allure.