View from the Borders

View from the flower borders that is, because I'm still weeding and seeding while the wonderful weather holds. (If there is anybody out there reading this I'm not writing a gardening blog, it's just that time of the year).
Despite my efforts to change things over the years the soil here is so full of clay that it is far too heavy and cleggy to work on if it gets wet so it has to be all systems go while I get the chance. Of course if the weather stays sunny too long it turns to concrete and it practically takes a pick to break the ground. At present it's just right, and even hubby said how good the newly turned earth smells. Getting my hands in it is bliss even when it means they feel like a pair of hedgehogs afterwards. Just can't wear gloves to garden.
Unusually I had some time on my own and the house to myself the other day, so I ran through the options of what I could do with this freedom. I could jump in the car and go anywhere for a few hours but in the end the borders won and I went on with my battle to clear the ground. My tussles around the camellias resulted in a lot of buds and blossoms getting knocked off the bush so I rescued a few and put them in a little bowl I'd found in a charity shop. If they only last a very short time they are too lovely to leave where they were.

I know how boring I sound but I love a bit of solitude and I was really enjoying myself.

After I'd finished my stint in the borders, peeled, showered and changed, I took a cup of coffee and my library book and climbed up into the studio. I opened all the windows so that I could hear the children in the gardens around enjoying themselves in the sunshine and settled myself to just sit and be. It was so good to hear the the golden chime of summer floating up on the warm
air in that way that feels so timeless and reassuring.
Hubby had reminded me that there are at least two paintings which need to be finished so I put one up on the easel and spent a good while just looking at it, and then kept looking up from time as I read trying to catch it, (or myself) by surprise and see it through fresh eyes so that it could tell me what was needed to carry it forward.
It is an abstraction on some lakes I love to go to when I go home to Wales. It is a place I love and it often turns up in one form or another when I begin to paint.
Well I now know where I'm going to go with it and can't wait to break out the oil paints and get to it. I know the studio tidy up isn't finished but that will get done around the painting sometime.


Just as well rain is forecast and I can retreat back to my eyrie with a clear conscious, and leave the garden to another time.