Still calm

It seems almost impossible that it’s a week ago that I last chatted with you and this was the view with my morning brew.

Yes, I have slopped my tea down the side of my mug – it’s a bit of a walk from the house to the garden chairs where you can sit and take in this wonderful view and listen to the birds but it’s worth it! 🙂

Oh, I just couldn’t get enough of it!  I loved the stillness of the lake and how it reflected the trees and the mountains …

and I loved how the mountain changed colour as the light changed.

This is where we were staying for big daughter’s yoga retreat – she ran her first one last year and it went so well that she decided to run another one this year, and now I think that her intention is to come back to this beautiful place every year if she can.  The view is across Coniston Lake in the Lake District, and it’s a stunning part of the world.  There is certainly magic in the air in this peaceful place, and even though big daughter’s boyfriend and I were there for behind-the-scenes help and didn’t get a great deal of time off at all, we both felt the benefit of being here.

This is the yoga space; isn’t it lovely?

There were classes throughout the day with time off in between to relax in the lovely old house we were staying in.  Some people chose to go for a walk, others read books or just sat and enjoyed the view, and others took advantage of the quiet time for a snooze – on a weekend where the aim is to rest and recharge, afternoon snoozing in the sunshine is very definitely allowed!

There was also a late night yoga class which you could take in your pyjamas if you wanted to go straight to bed afterwards – the joy of being away to do yoga with no other commitments is that there’s no drive home after the class!  If this sounds like something that would suit you too, you can find out more about next year’s retreat here.

For me, one of the highlights were the housemartins nesting high up in the eaves of the house.  We were here earlier last year and they hadn’t built their nests at the time.  This year, nesting was in full flow and there were dozens of housemartins swooping and diving around the nests high up in the house eaves.

If you look closely, you can see a white shape against the dark of the nest – that’s a housemartin inside the nest, and even in the nests they didn’t stop chattering to each other!  It was constant, such a cheerful sound!

I also realised that for years, I’ve thought the birds that gather near to our house were housemartins but actually, I think they’re swallows.  I didn’t think that swallows stayed still long enough for you to be able to recognise them but apparently they are quite happy to sit on telegraph wires and chat, very much like housemartins do.  You can tell the difference by the length of their tail feathers and in this photo, you can see the housemartin at the very top has a shorter tail …

whereas the swallows have longer tails and that’s what the birds near our house have too.  Well!  We’ve been here nearly 20  years and I’ve just discovered I’ve been calling them by the wrong name!

Another highlight was the fire pit.  I do love a fire and it was warm enough to light one and sit outside every night whilst it went dark, watching the birds and the bats, and lights coming on in the houses across the lake.  It was dark too, so the stars were very bright and plentiful, far more than we see here where we’re too close to the M6 motorway for it ever to be very dark.

After the retreat ended and we were back home, I wasn’t keen to give up the deep calm I’d been feeling all weekend so on Tuesday, I took myself off to RHS Bridgewater again.  I do love to be in my own garden but there are always jobs to be done whereas I can enjoy someone else’s work at Bridgewater without feeling that I should be doing it myself!  The gardens have changed quite considerably since I was last there – surprising since it’s only been a few weeks, but at the same time not so surprising given how my garden has grown.  Last time, the borders were filled with tulips and this time, the alliums were out – beautiful purple heads on tall stems, and glorious en masse!

The borders by the Welcome Centre which last time had looked pretty bare, have filled out and look completely different …

and the flowers by the Chinese streamside garden were just beautiful.  These are varieties of primula which originated in China (a great many of the garden flowers that we have now originated in China, brought over by plant collectors in the Victorian era) – Primula vialii which, I think, is my favourite primula …

and this mass of colour are Primula bulleyana and Primula florinadae.  They were just beautiful, and the bees thought so too!

Nothing quite so exotic is flowering in my garden right now, but something that the bees have loved just as much …

Daisies!  Such cheery little faces, don’t you think?

 

And with that, I’m off.  Time for another brew and then if you need to find me, I’ll be in the garden 🙂  Exciting sock news next week – at last there’s something I can tell you about!  Have a lovely (UK Bank Holiday) weekend and I’ll see you soon! xx