Garden

Stillingfleet Lodge Gardens – exhibition

  Chips are flying and new sculpture is taking shape. The weeks before an exhibition are always exciting  –  even if there’s a bit of a frenzy in the workshop getting sculpture finished on time.  Nothing like an exhibition deadline to galvanise arms into action and focus the mind. This is Bird in a Tree […]

Scramble and Tumble

  Plants have personalities don’t they – this one seems to love stone and has gorgeous habits when the two are combined.  The little Bellflower (it takes its name from its bell-shaped flowers) loves to clamber over, up and between.  It looks wonderful scrambling between pavings or climbing up a wall, or tumbling over the […]

Walled Kitchen Gardens and Medicinal Plants

  What a delight and pleasure it is to arrive at Scampston Hall Walled Garden on a balmy summer’s evening.  Sometimes the beauty of plants and gardens makes you cry doesn’t it?  I couldn’t help it, more than once my eyes filled up with tears – I pretended to be scrutinizing bees in the borders […]

Sculpture in the Garden

  And what a beautiful garden it is. Here are images of my work at the Streamside Sculpture Trail at RHS Garden Harlow Carr. I walked the streamside path myself – it took ages as I stopped and took in the beauty of the planting in this garden and marvelled at the creativity and talent […]

Otter Streamside

  Today I delivered and set up pieces at RHS Garden Harlow Carr for the Streamside Sculpture Trail which is on during June.  At the gate I met a similarly loaded vehicle, with sculpture padded and strapped for the journey – and in the gardens other sculptors busy setting out their pieces. One of my […]

Bold Forms and Fine Foliage

  Today I bought a little fern in a pot.   A love for them must run in the family – this is a view of my great-grandfather’s greenhouse.  He took the picture too – photography was another of his passions.   Ferns found in stone are a glory too, the fossils showing such crisp detail […]

Autumn Pickings

  As Autumn colours emerge I’m tempted by the season’s offerings and collect snippets from the garden. Berries, seed-heads, golden leaves intense and bright.  I’m trying out my single-stem stone vases (also in autumnal hues) to show off my pickings.      

NGS Open Garden

  Looking out at the garden I see a bit of a wilderness – it is neglect  – untouched by my gardening hands for a while, yet it is busy doing its thing very happily without me.  A wild rose has self-seeded and is robustly scampering over everything so beautifully with pink delicate flowers that I’m […]

The Voice of Water

  Where the silver wave with sweetness fed the tiny lives of grass I was bent above, my image mirrored in the fleeting glass, And a voice from out the water through my being seemed to pass.   These are a few lines from George William Russell’s peom The Voice of the Waters.  He’s talking […]

A Meadow of Red Campion

  There is a walk I like doing, down the lane and back along a narrow footpath edging the fields surrounding the village. As I join the footpath I’m met with a glorious swathe of pink – a meadow planted with Red Campion – looking so utterly beautiful that I had to go and sit by it. Occasionally there […]