Here is the second part of Alison’s walk through the garden.

It’s still raining.

(here’s Part One if you missed it)

Alison: audio :

Alison: transcript

So interesting that there aren’t really any plants here, except sneaky little things that just kind of decided they were going to be here. :

Which is rather fun. And I’ve walked up here and I can see there’s a little path, very overhung with trees right down the side. And here I am with the bird of prey. I’m not entirely sure what the birds of prey are for. I’m not saying they’re not for something. I was just that I haven’t quite figured out. I’m not sure what the whole set of them is and where they are and why they are but it definitely caught my eye. I think that’s a good thing. I wanted to walk towards it and I think that’s part of the point. So that’s great.

I’m walking back towards the house now, but won’t go very far because I’m going to turn off to my right again.

And now come into a place with plants with mauve flowers. They’re a bit over actually and sort of bluey blue, green leaves and going up to, oh, they’re hydrangeas. I know hydrangeas, ha ha. I think they’re hydrangeas, they’re multicoloured hydrangeas. I always thought they were just pink or blue but these are pinky reddy, bluey, whitey things. Maybe they’re not hydrangeas, but they look like it anyway, so yeah. Oh, and there’s a bit of wall. It’s rather fun.

So, a bit of wall standing on its own. I think ‘what’s that bit of wall doing here?’

And I think it must be the old cottage, of course, so I’m going to come up and have a look at this. And this, this kind of reminds me of Stourhead, where they have these kind of grottos, but they’re all artificial whereas I imagine this is kind of original.

And yeah, here we are in this place with the broken bottles and old bits of hinge. We’ve got some of those I dug out of our garden with my metal detector. And the old stove, which is beautifully rusting, and looks really beautiful orange with its rust. And I can stand here by the wall and look down and really get a sense of all these shapes which is lovely. And a sense of the fact that — I don’t know — the house is down at the bottom. I mean, it’s a real sense of the undulations of the land, which is great.

I love the colour of those hydrangeas, or whatever they are. They really are lovely.  That multi-coloured effect. Oh! It’s now raining quite a lot and I didn’t bring a raincoat. While I’m here I’m just going to sneak up to the side and around the back of the cottage to the pot.

And now I’m under the trees, which is quite useful. I’m going to sneak down the back by the hydrangeas. I suppose this is the thing – that you can wander and wander and wander and if you had little kids coming here, (I suppose it’d be annoying to have little kids here,) but they’d just love it because they could just run around and play hide-and-seek. And as long as you didn’t mind them breaking things it would really be fun for them.

And then I’m going to turn up to the left and up the steps. And up to the bench, which says “These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines of sportive woods run wild”.

I don’t know who that’s by, and I quite like to know and there’s another seat up there. I wonder if that’s got anything written on it. I don’t think it has. Oh, and now this is a really good view because now, I am sort of level with the Veddw bench. I’m looking down. And there’s, there’s a real sense that something quite deliberate has been done here. There are so many shapes and the view is different from the one at the Veddw bench end and it’s kind of strange why.

You just see different things. You get lots of the shadows of the bench, maybe it’s just darker, I don’t know, and these those wonderful scarlet flowers. (Anne – Crocosmias...) Are they called red hot poker or something? That rings a bell. Anyway, whatever they are. They could be called red hot poker. That would be quite a good name for them.

So right now I’m going to come back down. Where am I going to go now? I’m going to go along here. So I’m going along little path on my right, so I haven’t gone back to the hydrangeas and I’m coming down. I feel like I’m going down the back way at the back alleys of an old terraced housing estate or something. And I’m looking down a quite steep slope. Actually so steep I don’t think I’m going to go down there while it’s raining in case I slip over.

So I’m going to carry on going along the back looking down on the orange flowers now, lots and lots orange flowers. And some pinky flowers. Do you like the way I’m so technical with these flower names? Oh there are yellow flowers, too, in a sort of a wash of lots and lots of plants, just in front of me. It looks like it’s kind of been left. And I like that, that’s got a kind of a wildness to it. Except it’s lots of plants that I don’t normally see. So that’s really good.

And here’s another bench.

“Time is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once”.

That’s good. Oh, and your breakfast things have been left out there. I’m going to come down the steps here and into this wash of plants. And what’s really interesting – my eye keeping being caught by your house.

I mean in a way, it’s I suppose quite comforting to know that there’s a house nearby, but on the other hand, I kind of I don’t want to see it because I want to look at the garden. Specially the top of the conservatory kind of catches my eye because it’s so white. Anyway, I’m going to walk around the side here. Which way should I go? I’m going to go left and oh, I do love these orangie reddy red, hot poker things whatever they are. I want some.

So many plants, my God, you’ve got so many plants in this garden and I don’t know what any of them are called. You need a little app that I could point my phone at them all and it would go. “This is a red-hot poker” (Anne: I think there are such things..)

Hatter’s Patch 18th century, Bulchey Bernhard 1687, The Cot 2006. I don’t know what that means. Does that mean to say that this little area was called Hatter’s Patch and then it was called, Bulchey. Bernhard, or is that a person?

Buwch is cows, I think, in Welsh.

But that’s with a W. The Cot. Well, we know about the Cot but so I’m not quite sure what that’s doing, it’s like a gravestone. So is that in memory? Or ….

Here’s the pool. I love the pool. I love the way the pool is so dark and that it never occurred to me until I saw on the video that it’s dark because you put some dye in it. I didn’t know that. I just thought, wow, how do you do that?

And it’s great. I’m sitting here on the bench and there’s lots of little creepy, crawly bouncy fly things on the surface and they’re going around and bouncing on the surface and I’m just looking up at the wavy lines of hedge and this is a really nice spot.

There’s something very, very peaceful about this. And I think it’s one feels hugged. One feels enclosed. It feels comfortable and safe, even though I realize that somebody could creep around the side and jump out on me. But yeah, no, it feels, it feels like a bit like, – this is gonna sound stupid – I feel a little bit like, sitting on a bus, you know, when you’re in a bus and you know, the doors are closed and you know that your seat has got a high back. And you can see ahead of you. And you’re seeing what you expect to see ahead of you, it’s a kind of known space.

Yeah, I really like this this area and I do wonder how deep that pool is and I suppose it’s actually not very deep at all. It’s probably something like up to my ankle and no more. But of course, nobody would know.

But now it’s raining a lot. And actually that’s very beautiful. I’m going to sit and look at that for a minute. It’s raining on to the pool and I can tell exactly how much it’s raining by looking at the pool. I can also tell by looking at my trouser leg.

And it’s really, rather lovely. I don’t have a sense that it matters a lot here that it’s raining. It’s not going to actually tip I don’t think and it’s really quite warm. Just slightly annoying having checked the weather forecast and it said, it wasn’t going to rain. But there, that’s Chepstow for you.

But yeah, I yeah, this is a really nice place. The seat’s a little hard. Maybe that’s the point, to stop people sitting here too long. It’s actually not uncomfortable because it’s broad so you can lean back. But if I was going to be here for a long time, I’d probably bring a cushion. But I can imagine that lots of people gravitate here when they come and visit and just sit.

I think I would.

And here’s the walk on the garden plan:

There will be more – she’s hardly begun!