Smoke and mirrors . . .

I've learned that close up pictures can hide a multitude of sins.

My garden at the moment is looking okay, but has not yet fully recovered from the battering it received from the dogs over the winter. There's also plenty of gaps waiting to be filled when I can afford the plants.

The vegetable patch, too, is also so-so. There have been germination issues this year!

But, like I say, close up, there's some nice flowers and plants. Here's a very short slideshow highlighting some of the best bits. Not quite Chelsea, but there you go.

My big dilemma at the moment is what tree to plant in the back garden. I want something with the shape of a silver birch, with a light, airy canopy, but I don't really want it to go above 5 or 6 metres. Anyone got any ideas. (I don't really want an ornamental cherry!)

Home turf

Or home lupin, to be precise. Here's one in my cold frame ready to be planted out . . . just waiting for the bank holiday rain to ease up.

Blue is the colour . . .

Except it's not . . . they lost - but who cares.

The only Chelsea I was interested in over the past few days was Chelsea Flower Show, which I was lucky enough to get a ticket to.

As a bit of a gardener, I suppose I should be inspired by Chelsea, but in fact I get a bit daunted and depressed. Tens of thousands of pounds are spent on the show gardens and they're just too good, too perfect. There's no way I could reproduce anything like them.

That's not entirely true (I've just had a glass or two of red wine and I'm feeling a a bit maudlin) - it is a good place to get ideas for planting combinations; to see what plants go well together and, in the grand marquee, you can see just what plants are availabe to us.

What is beyond most of us is the hard landscaping - the pavilions, sculptures, walls and miles of perfect York stone paving. No concrete slabs from B&Q at Chelsea!

Anyway, I suspect most people will feel a bit Chelsea'd out at this point - endless coverage on the TV and wall to wall in the papers. So here's just a couple of flowery pictures . . .




The person I accompanied to Chelsea is a well-known shopper (well-known to shopkeepers around East Anglia, anyway), so nothing was going to keep her away from the avenue to trade stands at Chelsea, In fact, she was very restrained. Here are a few of the things she managed to avoid buying.

Bank holiday banker

I'm not a great fan of bank holidays - too many people with free time at the same time. It's always too busy where ever you go. We tend to stay at home and hide!

However, it was the boys' 11th birthday on Saturday, so we had to do something.

Their birthday treat was a visit to Legoland at Windsor, but we took them the previous Saturday to avoid the crowds, ho ho!

No pictures to speak of because we spent most of our time in queues for rides. Token photo below.



On their actual birthday, we took them (plus older sister) to High Lodge at Thetford Forest and, though it was quite busy, had a nice time. The children enjoyed the playgrounds (including 17-year-old big sis), we played cricket and football, then it was back home for a party tea (is there a better meal?) and more hours on the new Wii (Mariokart and tennis).




There was a new 'attraction' at Thetford Forest - a big wooden pyramid to with two tunnel slides.



The eldest daughter is off on her gap year travels at the moment, but she did remeber to send birthday cards from New Zealand. She's following in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg - Around The World in 80 Days or, in her case, 12 weeks. So far on her whistle stop tour, she's done New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fiji and New Zealand. In a couple of weeks, she's off to Oz.

Anyway, back to the more mundane . . . Sunday saw us make our usual visit to a garden centre - this week to pick up dog food and flea treatment for both the dogs. Pm, Mrs DW took me to Blacks in Cambridge to buy a new pair of walking boots for my birthday (9th) if anyone is planning to help me celebrate. I can't post a picture of said boots because they were whisked away and hidden (under the bed)!

Sunday was also interesting because the dog and I discovered two new residents in the village. Most of the farms around the village are arable - oilseed rape as far as the eye can see. But one local farmer has decided to branch out . . . into rare breed cattle. We bumped into him inspecting his two young White Park cows which had arrived just the day before.



He told me he was fed up with driving a tractor up and down spraying crops and, though he was meant to be retired, thought he'd like to help save this very rare breed. When he was growing up, his family had a dairy herd and though that was long ago, I think he still has a passion for cattle.

The two cows, which he hopes to start breeding from this year, came from the herd at Wimpole Hall. Apparently. there are only about 200 breeding females in world (there's a herd in Germany and another in the USA) and its quite a complicated process breeding them because you can't breed from the same line for four generations (to prevent in-breeding).

Finally, I had a perfect Bank Holiday Monday - two pleasant walks with the dog, during which we spotted a nice deer with antlers, and the rest of the day in the garden, planting, weeding and generally pottering.



Perhaps, bank holidays aren't all bad after all.

Dog tired . . .

Apologies in advance for an image-heavy entry - new route and new camera too much to resist

Yes, a very tired dog. This morning we ventured deeper into the fens than ever before and had our longest walk. The poor old hound was exhausted, but was a lovely walk and very interesting, too.

On the nature front, I heard my first cuckoo of the year. It seems very early. My memory says (and I think I've mentioned this in a previous blog) that it's usually the end of May before the cuckoo heralds its arrival. I suppose it's either global warming bring them here earlier or my memories are false.

There seem to me lots of yellowhammers about this year - the hedgerows out in the fen seem full of them. Also plenty of reed buntings and the dog and I stood and watched (and listened to) a greater spotted woodpecker for a while.

I had to consult the bird book when I got home to identify a pair of tits we saw - unfortunately, it wasn't able to help me get closer than either a marsh tit or a willow tit. Apparently, they're hard to tell apart, even for experts.

I stopped to take pictures of some cowslips and when I looked up, I could just make out a little face watching me intently through a bush. Of course, the camera was set up to take a close-up picture of a flower, so I struggled to quickly change the settings. I had the autofocus on, so my first effort resulted in a nice sharp image of the bush. I flicked the camera into manual focus and just managed to take one picture - not quite in focus - before the deer broke cover.

It's now Monday - computer crashed while uploading the cowslip picture (now, it's a critic!) and I just gave up for the evening.

Further on our walk, we came across part of the new path being built by the National Trust to connect Wicken Fen Nature Reserve to Cambridge. They've even built a posh new bridge across Swaffham Lode. They're also cleverly making the path twice as long as it needs to be by making it snake across the landscape.




Some time ago, I read how one of the major drainage ditches on the fen (the Commissioner's Drain, I believe) went under Swaffham Lode and I imagined a tunnel going deep underground.

In fact, the lode is at quite a high level, so the drain goes under it at about ground level. It was difficult to get a picture which illustrates this, so I took two - one of each side of the lode, from the top of the embankment.

Next time we travel that way, I'll try to get down to the level of the drain to see the entrance.

Further down the lode we came to the pumping station where it joins the River Cam. There's an old fashioned lock gate, but the work seems to be done by a modern steel rising gate. I thought the river level would be much higher that the lode, but in fact, the lode was higher.

From here, we turned towards Cambridge along the banks of the Cam - a peaceful spot to have a houseboat, though the 'taggers' still managed to leave their mark at the Bottisham Lode pumping station, which is really a long way from anywhere.

Finally, with the dog (and me) flagging, it was time to head for home. Just time to capture one of those big fen skies.

Flash, bang, wallop . . .

. . . what a picture, what a photograph. Or at least I hope so.

New camera this week - back to an SLR after a few years of a compact. I enjoyed the Nikon, it was very versatile but also a bit unwieldy if I wanted to take pictures on anything other than the 'auto' setting.

Anyway, a walk with the dog on Sunday was the first opportunity to use the new 'equipment'.

It was a pleasant walk along a newish route that I'd not photographed before, but the hound was being a bit awkward, making it a bit difficult to stop and look around.

We did find a pond we'd not spotted before - very picturesque but spoiled a bit by all the litter left behind by kids who obvioulsy used the place for drink parties etc.

This stretch of the walk takes me over a couple of bridges - a narrow footbridge and an old railway bridge, the line for which has long since been ripped up.

There was a pair of blackbrids going beserk in the garden on Sunday morning - giving the cat a right telling off. A bit of investigation uncovered this poor little thing hiding in the undergrowth . . .

Funilly enough, I was reading a piece last week about how fledgling blackbirds often get turfed out of the nest a bit early, but it was important to leave them alone because their parents continue to look after them.

Well, it survived Sunday and Monday, though I do worry that one of the many neighbourhood cats will make a little snack of him.

Sunday pm, we went into Cambridge to visit the Botanic Garden We'd just started taking a look around (a reluctance to pay the entry fee meant I hadn't been there for years) when the heavens opened. We sheltered in the coffee shop for a while, then the glasshouses, but we admitted defeat in the end and beat a wet and hasty retreat back to the car.

I did get the chance to take a few pictures, but not as many as I would have liked.

Time flies

Where does the time go?

It doesn't seem two minutes since we were having an Easter egg hunt in the snow . . . 45 eggs counted out, only 41 counted in! I did find one lying in the grass after the snow had melted but I'm not sure where the rest went.

Then the next weekend, we had the opposite weather and I found myself in Ely for a couple of hours while one of the boys had some cricket coaching. We used to live in Ely and really liked it there but moved away about 10 years ago.

It's changed quite a bit in that time - lots more houses, new park down by the river, new shops etc - but the cathedral is an ever present wonder. It never fails to lift and amaze me.

There's always something to photograph in Ely - like this impressive chimney stack and a nice surprise when a small steam lorry passed me by.