It’s been a week of gusty winds and unsettled weather, but also of good-ish news: double-vaccinated EU residents are finally going to be allowed to travel to England without the need to quarantine, allowing families (like ours) to reunite. Except for anyone coming from or going through France to reach the shores of Albion, which we do. We’re told this is because there are cases … Continue reading Six on Saturday: 31 July 2021: Save the insects!
More torrential rain in Belgium with further flooding in places, more upturned cars (a phone typo had this as ‘upturned cats’, as far as I know this isn’t a phenomenon but you never know) and muddy streets. Hope those climate talks are going well. A particularly heavy shower today brought down a heavy dahlia stem, so in they came! The sea urchin is Dahlia ‘Bora … Continue reading Storm damage
Summer days are here, the living is pretty easy, especially now that work has slowed right down and the sun has come out to play. After all the rain we had here, I’m relieved, and cat-like, I enjoy basking in the dry heat. The deckchairs are out and the BBQ is in use. For Six on Saturday, I’m going to start with a dazzling dahlia: … Continue reading Six on Saturday: 24 July 21: summer’s here
Things are rarely entirely good or entirely bad, and so it is with summer in Belgium this year. On the bad side, we had the terrible weather and the terrible flooding in parts of the country. The clean-up is going to be long and expensive. Plus, we still have the confusion and uncertainty over how and when we can get to the motherland for our … Continue reading Summer days: butterflies, blight and Banksy
Well that was an awful lot of rain. You will have no doubt heard about the floods in eastern Belgium and seen the devastation on the news. Towns that we drove through in spring when we went to that region for a lovely holiday have been reduced to mud, upturned vehicles and rubble, it’s quite astonishing. Here in the centre of the country, perched on … Continue reading Six on Saturday: 17 July 21: Après le déluge
Coping with loss, failure, and disappointment is as much the gardener’s lot as the more celebrated joys and triumphs of successfully growing beautiful plants and bringing in bountiful harvests. Perhaps inevitably, we highlight the good stuff and tuck away the bad stuff, well away from the camera lens and our brightly edited versions of our gardens. But this year has been tough in more ways … Continue reading Six on Saturday: 10 July 2021: tribulations
Not the time-wasting, relentless drivel kind of tweeting (there you have my views on Twitter, although plant tweets are perhaps the only reason I might be tempted back to it one day), I’m talking about the insistent tweeting of the little family of great tits, who have set up home in the bird box in the glade. They have been here for several weeks, and … Continue reading Six on Saturday: 03 July 2021: Tweeting
