A day for rambling...

Spring just keeps on springing. More blue skies and sunshine.

I sorted out the pots at the front of the cottage this morning, removing all the dead plants and changing the compost where I needed to. The string of frosts we had in February and March killed off pretty much everything this year, including the huge marguerite plant I’d been growing in a big pot for the last eight years. We don’t get many frosts on the Llyn, the peninsula touches the tail end of the Gulf Stream wash so it has its own mini climate. You can pretty much grow anything around here, I even have a cactus that belonged to my grandfather on the front step. I leave it out all year around – summer and winter.

Most of my aquilegias have survived thank goodness. They can stand up to pretty much anything, but they’re not indestructible. I have dozens of them – all grown from seed, some quite rare. I love aquilegias. I’ve been trying to grow aquilegia ‘green apples’ for the last four years or so and have managed to get three seeds to start. I must have spend at least thirty quid on seeds – it’d be easier to just buy a plant from a specialist nursery but…well, it wouldn’t be quite the same. My aquilegia ‘green apples’ are tiny at the moment but I’m hoping to get them to grow. I think you’ll be reading about and seeing a lot of my aquilegias as the spring progresses.

Yes, more blue skies and sunshine – long may it continue, a decent summer would be nice.

We went to Porth Colman this afternoon, took a picnic and a beer and went looking for cowries. Cowries are tiny pink and grey shells that you can find on some of the beaches around here. Finding a cowrie is meant to be lucky and once we start looking for them we can’t stop, looking for ‘just one more’ and ‘just one more’. A few years ago on a particularly low tide at Porth Dinllaen we found three hundred and seventeen in about three hours - ‘just one more’, ‘just one more’ - we found fourteen at Porth Colman today which isn’t bad.
Port Colman is a good place to come in the winter, you can drive right down to the sea, along a tiny winding lane, and park up on the rocks to watch the waves. The sea can get very rough with huge waves that come crashing in and over the black spurs of rock. We saw a seal there once, watching it for an hour or so before it dived and disappeared under the deep green water.

There isn’t much of a beach at Porth Colman, it’s mainly a rocky headland, easy to walk on as the rocks form a natural pathway. It’s very beautiful. A good place for spotting oyster catchers but not a good place to beach comb as the rocks stop any ‘stuff’ getting washed ashore. Still, you work with what’s available, so I made these pebble towers. They look simple, but you wouldn’t believe the number of times they tumbled down before I got them to look like this.

All balance and prayer… how very Zen.