Off for a few days

A quick post to say good-bye because I will be away until Monday. I'm going visiting to Nottingham. One of the days there I'll be taken to Wollaton Hall, which looks pretty interesting.

At the last count there were 34 sweet pea seedlings from the sowing I made 2 weeks ago, the tallest of which is about 2 inches.

I was up the street a couple of hours ago and bought a copy of "A Year in a Victorian Garden" by Henry Bright, 1874, in the local hospice shop. It's rather pretty-pretty, which normally puts me off, but when I read a few lines I was won over:

"Nothing is more stupid than the ordinary way of planting Crocuses - in a narrow line or border. Of course you get a line of colour, but that is all, and, for all the good it does, you might as well have a line of coloured pottery or variegated gravel."

I see that near the beginning he refers to the garden's 4 mile distance from a major town as a problem because, "there comes down upon us every now and then a blast, laden with heavy chemical odours, which is more deadly than either smoke or salt". It makes me think atlhough it's all too easy to find problems with our current way of life, the things we are lucky to be without tend to be harder to keep in mind.