Back

Well its back to work after a few days spent beach combing on Kingsbarns Beach near to St Andrews. We borrowed a cottage from a friend which was ten minutes walk from the beach - these poppies and ragwort growing out of the top of a wall were one of the things we passed on the way.

Now I am busy working on the flowers for a wedding at the weekend - making moss garlands to put over the arch into the church, taping grids on glass vases and painting barrels to plant up with daisies.

But first I think that I shall make myself a cup of coffee and go and delight in the sight of thousands of blooming sweet peas before they all get cut tomorrow.

Yesterday was the beginning of our "holiday" - I am back working in the shop today but then away for a few days away from the computer, weeding and packing up wire baskets!

We went to Perthshire to fulfil promises made to the girls last year. Last June we all picked a touristy thing we would like to do but then the summer was so gloriously sunny we just played outside all the holidays and didn't venture out at all.

It isn't exactly like that this year so we got in the car and headed for Perthshire.

Zoe's choice was to go and see the ospreys at Loch of the Lowes - this has two great hides with telescopes trained on osprey nests so you can watch the birds flying over the loch, catching perch and then bringing them back to the nest for everyone to feast on. The Scottish Wildlife Trust has a couple of webcams sited at the nest so you can follow the ospreys' progress when back home

Katie's choice was to go to the Crannog Centre on Loch Tay - a reconstruction of a crannog - a prehistoric house built on stilts over the loch. It was a very hands on place - we got to sit round a fire in the crannog discussing what would be eaten, who would have lived there, how many people would be in the house, where would they keep their animals. Then we had a chance to have a go at wood turning with a pole lathe, making fire, spinning and pecking holes in weight stones.


The photo shows Katie watching the very impressive demonstration of how to make fire (which has me worried).

Both places were examples of what tourist venues should be - authentic, enthusiastic, realistically priced and completely non-disneyfied.

I have found out that I share a certain garden aesthetic with the iron age - hurdle fences, rough hewn seats, stone weights - I took a lot of photos - I'm sure I could find a use for those weights.


I shall be away from computers until next Thursday.

Space and simplicity

I have just finished reading Margaret Forster's book Keeping the world away - a novel about the effect that Gwen John's painting of the corner of an attic bedroom has on the women who hang it on their walls.

It is, in part, a study of the yearning for simplicity and control symbolised by the spare, composed painting.

I enjoyed the book very much and was thinking of it today while I drove though the sublime landscape of deep cleft valleys and deep reflective lochs that is between here and Loch Fyne.

It is a beautiful, beautiful drive, I was on my own in the car and it is quite the most relaxing thing I have done this week. I was going up to The Tree Shop, run by the Ardkinglas tree nursery to pick up some beautiful white birch trees - Betula utilis "Jacquemontii snowqueen" which I am intending to use to make a small glade at this wedding in ten days time. The idea is that it will make the large space a bit more intimate and give a sense of enclosure for the guests who want to sit down after the meal away from the music.

At the moment the state of the house is getting to me. It is completely my own fault so I can't really complain - but I do. It isn't really a case of it not being clean - it is just that we have far too much stuff in a house with no storage and I try to run a business at the same time. Add into this mix we bought kitchen furniture before we have enlarged the kitchen and that we are all messy, messy creatures who can't seem to pick up anything off our seemingly magnetic floors.

The result is a feeling of camping in amidst piles of toppling stuff - it is driving me mad and I now want to move out into Gwen John's little attic with only a chair, a desk and a vase of primroses.

The most stressful day

I am posting this image of a lovely calming hydrangea heart to compensate for having the MOST STRESSFUL DAY.

This morning was fine - not really my sort of thing but there you go. Katie wanted to spend her holiday money - £13.68 - so we went into Glasgow and she went into a frenzy in Claire's Accessories where they had a special deal where you could get10 sale items for £5.

We now have a very happy 6 year old with lots of glittery bits in her hair.

Then I got back here to find that the buttons on my website were not all working properly - aaaarggggh - lots of individual orders instead of nicely grouped ones. I emailed everyone to confirm their orders and refund their multiple postages and thought "Aha, it is a problem with the shopping baskets - I can fix that"

So I redid all the shopping basket buttons on the website, very tedious work, - loaded it all up and found that now NOTHING worked.

Hmmmm. I was not a happy bunny. I ate a lot of chocolate (73% cocoa - allowed), I stomped around, I phoned the Stirling Enterprise IT man (who was out). In the end it turned out that I had bookmarked paypal and they had subsequently changed their site so none of my buttons matched their baskets. Therefore nothing connected and you just got error messages.

Now I have redone it all again and it looks to be working. I think. Of course I have managed to b****r up all the spacing on the pages in my panic but that is for another day. I have put a note up about contacting me if anything doesn't work.

See pride comes before a fall. How professional I must look.

I am now off to pack up these baskets and calm down so that they can be sent off with love! After the postal strike that is.

Saying yes

This New Year's resolution was to say "yes" more often - not the advice you would give to your teenage daughter necessarily but for a 37 year old prone making excuses it seemed a good idea.

So when s woman from the production company SMG phoned me a couple of weeks ago to see whether I would be an "expert" on a reality tv show they were making for Scottish Television and Sky - well I said "yes".

Filming was yesterday - and boy it was fun. I had begun to get cold feet about it earlier in the week, worrying about either sounding like I had just swallowed helium or getting that deer in the headlights look. A friend from my book group, Clara is a tv director, presently on maternity leave and she kindly calmed me down - pointing out there would be 5 hours of filming and only a maximum of 5 minutes footage actually used - surely even I could sound compos mentos for that amount of time.

The photo shows crew and contestants with me in the middle - as foraging expert. I can't say more about the programme as it builds week to week - it is called Capture the Castle and should be on in November.

The crew were fantastic and it was SUCH as good experience - I'm so glad I've started saying "yes"

Magazine madness . . .

Yesterday I went into Glasgow to sort out a few things - I had an hour to spare while the shop tried to fix our i-pod battery so went to Borders magazine department.

Ah, fatal - all the imports were just in (its work you know!) - and I am a sucker for nice photos and 101 ways with ric-rac.

Actually the aesthetic of most of the US magazines is a bit too frilly and pristine for me but in some ways that is ideal for inspiration as I can't accidentally slide into full on plagiarism (see Gigibird for an interesting post on this). The uppermost magazine is new to me - an Australian production though with Abigail Ahern's house and also somewhere very very nice and calm in the Netherlands.

Getting this bag bursting lot took 5 minutes so I went for a coffee at the hyper stylish Fifi and Ally.

Scotland's Garden Show

Today I met a friend at Scotland's Garden Show at Ingilston. She has suggested that we do a show garden there next year and we were there to see exactly what was involved and decide whether it would be a good idea.

To be honest I was really disappointed - there were hardly any show gardens and most were quite derivative with plants stuffed in so that they looked like a garden centre shopping trolley after a colour co-ordinated shopping spree.

I was rather glum and hot footed it over to the floral hall where the nurseries exhibit. And there - lo and behold - was the innovation, high quality construction and beautiful planting that was missing in the outdoor show gardens. Unfortunately the lighting isn't great within the hall and I didn't have my big flash so the photos are really bad but this garden was by far my favourite. It is part of the Binny Plants Stall and is a co-operative venture with the Biggar based garden design and construction company Landmarkers (LandmarkersScot@aol.com) and the metal artist Andrea Geile.

Binny Plants is one of my favourite nurseries - they grow their plants well and hard, they don't feed them junk to puff them up for shows and as a result they transplant well into the rigours of a Scottish garden. Their paeonies are second to none for the Scottish garden.

The garden was a gently tiered construction of rusted steel and drystoned slate with a sheet of vertical water at the back and beautiful, effective, natural, zippy and eminently copyable planting throughout. The colours were dark reds, purples and whites like many of the stalls - why fight against nature? - but had a vibrant streak of bright orange which sparked the whole composition up.

Many of the plants that I coveted - like this Troillus x cultorum "Cheddar" had already sold out but I have them written down in my notebook for next year.

This garden made my day. I'm just sorry that the photos are so bad.

foraging for food

May in Scotland sees the hungry gap in the self sufficient calender - stored root vegetables are past their best and the peas and beans of June are not yet here. Unless you are going to survive on asparagus, rhubarb and baby salad leaves you are going to have to look outside the vegetable patch for sustenance.

As I've mentioned before we are much more gardeners for fun than gardeners for self sufficiency but I love the idea of foraging for food. Over the years I have tried to convince the family of the joys of pignuts and gorse buds. Over the years I have failed. There is a lot of digging and picking involved for very little and to be honest, if we were trying to live on it we would be dead.

However - nettles are a different story. We have a lot of nettles, we have an awful lot of nettles, and ten minutes picking gives us enough in the basket to make cream of nettle (mint and parsley) soup. A soup the children will actually eat. Mind you it is hardly self sufficient as it involves a deal of cream and a good chicken stock (and we don't kill our chickens).

As I took my lunch outside to photograph yesterday everyone was (quite justifiably) laughing hysterically. Euan thinks this blogging thing has got out of hand if I, a very greedy person, is putting aesthetics before eating.

A busy day

First a photo of some lavender sellers - Rebecca, Katherine and Sally - also helping were Zoe, Jan, Hannah and Esther. They made over £70 which is fabulous - and as it is ring - fenced money for the school grounds the children get to keep that feeling of achievement and ownership rather than it being part of the PTA pot. We shall be planting out the remaining plants as a lavender hedge - hopefully on Monday.

The plants all looked small in comparison to the artificially souped up plants of a garden centre - I'm sure that many plants bought because they were the school's plants - but I am also sure that they will find the plants outperform the larger garden centre plants in the end as they are used to the cold and haven't been fed a diet of junk food.

Yesterday was a packed day as I was also making up table flowers for a party - here they are crammed into a wooden trug, ready to be transported to Killearn.

Then in the evening it was a Guatemalan night in the village hall - hosted by Maria Casteel in aid of a nursery she is trying to set up in her native Guatemala. The company was great - many of the same faces as the fun day, but this time glammed up and without cake icing or chocolate fountain goo in their hair - the food was fantastic and our attempts at salsa dancing were very very sorry indeed.

Drymen Primary School Fair

I am very, very keen on getting children gardening, or at least getting their hands into the soil. I have a C19th belief that growing things is good for the soul and to this end I am working with Drymen Primary School's Eco board to raise funds for growing things in the school grounds.

Tomorrow there is a school fun day with lots of stalls, activities and a football tournament and the eco board shall be selling lavender plants - see above - which have been growing away in my polytunnel. The plants are still small but they are good sturdy wee plants and the ideal size for planting out as a hedge or patch as they will grow away quickly with minimal root disturbance.

Everyone is welcome at the funday - there will be homebaking and teas - it is not just a school thing.

So far the school's new raised beds have been planted with strawberries, peas and carrots. They still have one bed to plant and they still have to decide what to put in it. I love going down to help plant - the enthusiasm, particularly from the Primary 2s and 3s is fantastic.

Voting after all.

On Thursday it was the election for the members of the Scottish Parliament and local councillors. At the moment there doesn't seem to be a party that represents my views and I seriously thought about not voting at all.

Then I thought back to all those history lessons about the long hard fight for the right to vote and headed off to the polling station at the library.

As soon as I got there I knew that I had done the right thing - though there was no-one I would say I truly supported there were quite a few parties on the form - such at the UK Independence party - that I definitely do not want anything to do with so I could at least use the opportunity to vote against them.

I was doubly glad that I had voted on Friday evening when I came across a Scottish blog entry of shocking xenophobia - it read very like the canvassing letter from UKIP that arrived on my doormat last week. It complained about those hordes of foreigners arriving in our Scottish towns, taking our jobs and leering at our women.

Drymen, where I live, and the surrounding area is an area of fantastic beauty - tourists flock to see Loch Lomond, to climb the hills and to walk the West Highland Way. The area is very reliant on tourism in all its forms and the tourism industry is very reliant on workers from other countries, who are chosing to spend some time working and travelling in Scotland. Just as every other waiter in Sydney seems to be a Scot working their way round Australia, there are a lovely stream of foreign nationals working in our hotels, on our farms, and so on. They add to the area, some come back year on year, some return with their families on holiday.

My constituency now has a Scottish Nationalist Party member of Scottish Parliament. The SNP now have the most MSPs (by 1) but no obvious prospect of forming a coalition government with another party, so no prospect of real power. Their policies, I hasten to add, have no xenophobia in them at all and if it was not for their yen for an independent Scotland many of their left wing policies would probably appeal to me. However I do hope, as an English neighbour said this morning, that they weren't voted in by insular Scots wanting to keep all sasenachs and foreigners out.

In my opinion Scotland's problem is that it isn't diverse enough - it is only because of the recent bolstering of Glasgow's Polish community that we can now get decent rye bread at Partick farmers market!

Shop - 27th April

We are very tulipy today - a medly of orange tulips, including the lily tulip Ballerina which smells like fresias, tall apricot "dordogne", deep purple "recreado", yellow parrot "texas gold" and the giganitically tall cream "purissima".

There are also baby moon narcissi and some anenomes, late hyacinths and love lies bleeding.

Here is Jasmine sunbathing and waiting for customers to pay her attention.

Tomorrow I shall be at Baldernock Garden Club's annual plant sale in Baldernock Church Hall, Balmore Road 11-1. There is usually a very good plant stall so I am taking my money. here are details of the garden club.

Green Gallery Opening

Sally and I set up our stall outside the new Green Gallery this lunchtime - the sun was shining, the birds were singing, you could feel heat bouncing of the pale pink of the outbuilding wall.

By the time the Gallery opened at 2 our basky wee corner had somehow turned into an arctic wind tunneland we were laughingly innappropriate in our dress.

That aside, the afternoon was a good one. It was certainly very busy - for a half hour it was like that episode in Jimmy's Farm where they have to have stewards helping people reverse miles down single track roads and comandeer fields to park in.


The photographs are of Carneval de Nice tulips, a spring window box with muscari 'fascination', narcissi 'baby moon' and tulip 'gavota', and a cow in the sculpture garden - look at those eyelashes!

Green Gallery Opening and a temporary addition to our family.

Today was a day of rest - I just haven't got down to anything - just drifted from one half completed task to another.

I began potting on lavender cuttings which will be for sale at Drymen School's Fun day on May 12. The lavender stall will be manned and managed by the school's eco board and all proceeds will be going to pay for improvements to the school playground. I have agreed to nurture the cuttings until the sale. What a responsibility!

Tomorrow afternoon I shall have a stall at the opening of the Green Gallery- this is quite exciting. The Green Gallery used to be in Aberfoyle and always had a good mix of art and crafts. Its owner, Becky Walker has a keen eye for the kind of paintings, sculptures and ceramics that actually work in a home. I have never been in the position to buy a painting (though I have coveted a few) but over the years I have bought some lovely pottery and ceramics. Just before Christmas the Gallery moved to Becky's home in Buchlyvie - the Christmas Exhibition was in her actual home, a beautiful Victorian sandstone house with wonderful views to the hills. Now the gallery has moved to its proper place, a converted coach house in the grounds. I saw the space yesterday and it looks lovely - calm, clear yet domestic. There is also a sculpture garden I am keen to explore as getting pleasing sculpture for outside can be difficult. The opening is tomorrow 2-5 and all are welcome. More details of the exhibition are on the Green Gallery website.


This is Tim - a 12 year old Jack Russell. Tim's owner died last night so he has come to stay with us until he can be found a new owner. So far he seems to be a lovely dog - he and Jasmine are rubbing along fine and the cats are ignoring him.

He is used to being the only dog in the house with a single owner so I was a bit concerned about how he would take to us. So far, so good though he is still at the compulsive wandering around stage. His owner was not in great health for a while I am told so he didn't get many walks - his wandering sounds like someone drumming their long fingernails in impatience.

If anyone knows of someone with space in their home and heart for what seems to be a great wee dog - call me on 01360 660 903.

Talk, talk . . .

Tonight I have been at Buchlyvie Garden Club talking about growing cut flowers. It was good fun. I was actually a bit nervous - I was using a borrowed power point projector and worried that something would go wrong with the connections. I can use it if it works, I am lost if something goes wrong.

In the end it was something more mundane that caused problems with the visuals. The screen, usually stored in the gents loos, was missing and we were faced with the prospect of having to project the images onto a mustard coloured woodchip papered wall. Lovely.

With 2 minutes to go before the start the missing screen was discovered . . . locked in the WRI (Women's Rural Institute) cupboard. Is this inter-club rural rivalry?

The flowers in the blue bucket are Narcissus "geranium", one of the longest lasting and most fragrant narcissi- a Sarah Raven recommendation . I picked a few buckets full to take along and sell to raise funds for The Tullochan Trust.

Drymen Primary School garden

Yesterday we were at Drymen primary School as part of a parents task force to sort out the beds in the playground.

When the school was built flower beds were incorporated into the playground. Unfortunately they were filled with concrete and rubble under a thin layer of soil (Why do they do this?????). They were also flush with the tarmac surface - encouraging children to run straight over them in pursuit of a ball.

As places for the children to grow anything they were a disaster - puddles lay on the surface in the rain, and they baked solid in the sun. Apart from daffodils and weeds nothing ever grew.
Last year's planting efforts were even more dismal than usual as someone came along with a spade and stole most of the plants. The CCTV which was installed after other vandalism will hopefully stop this happening again.

The children at the school are all keen on the idea of planting things and particularly in making their playground a haven for wildlife. It has been a shame that their efforts have been doomed to failure, through no fault of their own.

So over the Easter holidays a group of parents got busy, Colin Campbell created wooden raised beds from wood supplied by Gilmour and Aitken timber yard, and yesterday we had a grand weeding session, finally filling up the new raised beds with very fine top soil.

One of the beds was planted up with salvaged plants with some additions from here. Hopefully the children will have lots of ideas as to what they would like to see in the other 4.

Family weddings

Yesterday was a family day - we headed over to my parents in East Lothian for a day of catching up and bracing walks along Gullane beach.

We also fitted in a visit to see the church and hotel where my brother Stephen and his fiancee Helen will be getting married in August.

I shall be arranging the flowers so it was a relief that they are both lovely venues - full of light and air. I always dread wedding receptions in those dead corporate type venues where the flowers have to fight against the polystyrene tiles on the roof and the rails left over from audio visual presentations.

At the moment I am trying to build up a visual portfolio of month by month ideas for weddings and events - on actual wedding days there never seems to be enough time for taking anything other than record shots.

The photo shows Zoe modelling a bridesmaid headdress, a half band of individually wired hyacinth florets, each with a couple of amber glass beads in the centre. She looked very, very pretty in it practicing to be a bridesmaid!

Country Living Roundup.

This was meant to have been done on Thursday - ah well - it is probably a bit irrelevant really but these are stalls I liked at the show and then there are a couple of rants


Caroline Zoob - always beautiful, much copied, but then they never quite get it right.

Primrose Hill Interiors. Flowers, ginghams, hearts and dots

Boxwood - the most packed stall in the hall.


And now for Rant 1.

The Country Living Magazine awards a prize for the best stall design, the prize is a free stall next year and it is meant to encourage people to put a lot of effort into their stall design and so improve the look of the whole show. we won last year and it was a good reward for a lot of hard work that went into the look of the stall over and above the things we were selling.

This is the stall that won

Hume Sweet Hume. I don't really understand it - I'm not being tricksy with the photos - that is the whole stall, there isn't something interesting just out of view. Now I like Hume Sweet Hume's products, their knitted cushions are very soft and tasteful, but this is not a designed stand. It is a shop fitting c. 1997.

This is the stall I think should have won.

Dream Acres had a great hand cart that became the stall and lots of things, including these patchwork flowers, had been made for the show.

I think it very peculiar - and judging from the amount of people who mentioned the odd choice at our stall - so did a lot of visitors.

Rant 2

There has been a lot of bad publicity for Country Living Shows within the blogging community, a feeling that there are not enough small craft producers any more, that much of the stuff on offer is bought in and that there is a lack of variety, that they are too crowded for a leisurely browse . The knee jerk reaction seems to be to blame the magazine and actually I do not think that that is justified.

Stalls are expensive - the overall expenses for a small stall for a one of the shows must come in at about £2,000 - but this is very much in line with all trade shows -many of which do not have the slickness of the CL show. I was constantly amazed by the speed and professionalism of the Melville team handling the putting up and taking down of the show. I don't get the feeling that the shows are a great money making exercise for CL magazine.

So, to cover costs you need to sell approximately £4,000 over the 4 days. Now this is not an issue for some stalls - Stephensons Rocking Horses must take double that every day, one jumper stall told me of a customer spending £2,500 in a single purchase - but it is an issue for most of the craft stalls. This is because customers do not value their products properly.

I had bought a felt corsage, made from knitted material hand felted then sewn up, a one off.

It is lovely and goes well with my red coat and cost all of £16.00. I feel that it was a more than fair price. 2 customers told me - without my having brought the subject up -that I should have saved my money and gone down to Accessorize where they have a 2 for 1 offer on corsages.

There seems to be an inability in many people to distinguish between mass produced throwaway items and hand made unique ones. It all comes down to price. Though they want the stalls there at CL Fairs so that it looks pretty, they will buy on the high street.

Then there is the customer who does appreciate the difference. The customer who has paid her £7.50 entrance and is using the Fair as a source of ideas. She quizzes about methods, she takes surreptitious photographs, she scribbles in her notebook. Friends say to each other "Oh what a good idea, you could do that".

I had 15 magnet buttons stolen from my noticeboards - presumably by people who thought "Oh what a good idea, I could do that".

So I don't think that it is the organiser to blame - yes, I wish they could get more innovative press coverage, yes I wish they would get more young people in with houses to fill, but really I think that it is the customers.

If you want the small crafty unique stalls to attend- BUY FROM THEM - don't just tell them the look nice.

As to the negative comments about the magazine itself see here I am with Nikki on deploring the laziness.

Rant over

We actually had a very good fair - but many people didn't - so I leave you with a last photo of my van. You can tell I am confined to bed today trying to recover my voice, this post has taken ages.

Time to chat

Today was a much more relaxed day - more a steady stream than mad surges so there was more time to talk to people.

Time to talk to customers who bought dahlias last year and are back to add to their collections this year.

Time to talk to the bloggers (8 in all) that came and said hello - hopefully you will all feel ready to comment now you've seen my face.

Time to talk to fellow stallholders and find out how the London shows are and make contacts.

Just time to talk.

I am actually not feeling that well this week - I caught some kind of chest infection from Zoe - so I have been drugged up today and paranoid about coming across as really spaced out. Tonight I am left with just a poor croak of a voice - I am keeping quiet and hope it is back to full force tomorrow. Otherwise it will have to be sign language.


Sorry that these are yet more photos of MY stall. I'm not trying to be narcissistic< I just forgot my camera.

Do come & say Hi if you are coming to the CL Fair this weekend.

Busy, busy, busy

Goodness, it was busy. At 10 o'clock as the doors opened we were still tagging up and sticking magnet sets up on the wall.
From that point on we didn't stop. Jo, who was in shopping stayed to help as we were overwhelmed with queues of people wanting to chat.
The nicest thing was that practically first in the queue were a couple of women who bought garden kneelers last year and rushed in to buy several more before we sold out. that got my day off to a very good start.
And we have sold out of a number of things so we shall be re-arranging the stall first thing this morning.
The upshot is that I haven't really had a chance to look round. I had intended to post about all the lovely stalls but haven't any photos and only know stalls either in the ways to the loos or near to us. Caroline Zoob's stall is gorgeous as usual, Primrose Hill Interiors is very pretty, Samantha Holmes has wonderfully luxurious jumpers and scarves and there are a couple of lovely vintage fabric stalls.