I always complete a review of all my blog photos from the whole year, in the first few days of January to whittle them down to just 3 to illustrate my annual hard copy blog book.

These are the top 3 from 2023: always 2 garden scenes, and one wildlife photo, selected from a longlist created as I quickly trawled through the roughly 3250 photos I’d used in my blog posts and other pages throughout the year.

But I’m sneaking in a few more to remind me of what we can look forward to as the year ahead unfolds: Scenes, plants, wildlife, sculpture, meadows, rainbows. Winter, spring, summer, autumn. A year in images. Sometimes complementing the words.

Except, of course, it never will look the same in 2024: one of the constant delights and challenges of a garden. Always influenced by what the weather throws our way, and just as importantly the vagaries of the light and rainfall for this upland photographer trying to capture the terroir.

And here with no explanation is my first choice of music for this post. (More later).

The Italian composer of the original version, Olivia Belli, (who I’d never heard of before) wrote these notes about her album Sol Novo (New Sun):

“Dawn is my favourite time to compose. I feel encouraged by the sense of calm and confidence that the morning light brings. I like to watch the change from night to day, the moment when all comes to life anew.

I wanted this album to be filled with light, the many kinds of different light that we have in my region, reflecting on the sea, on the mountains, the rich fields and the old villages. It’s a natural light, without human intrusion. It embraces us, and it shows us the future.”

 

Last year was fabulous for crocus, snowdrops, daffodils, meadows, autumn leaf colours, and rainbows. But not so good for dramatic autumn and winter mists and sunrises or sunsets.

When I started this blog in 2011, I liked the idea that if I could keep it going, it might capture some of the dramas of the garden, landscape and natural world over time. I didn’t anticipate that the timing would be so interesting.

The Met Office summary for the weather in 2023 confirms that it was the warmest ever year for Wales since records began in 1884. And this beat 2022, which was the previous warmest year. It was also the warmest ever year, globally. 2023 was also the wettest year since I’ve recorded rainfall, with an annual total of 2314 mm. Massively skewed towards the last 6 months, since we had a relatively dry January to June with “just” 861 mm. And in our part of Wales, significantly less sunshine than the rolling 30-year average. Our PV inverter captures just how sunny the first six months were before it all turned downhill. The detailed Met Office maps included in the report above highlight these features very clearly for our part of West Wales.

No wonder we’re noticing significant changes in how the world around us responds to such variations. For many years, our annual rainfall used to be about 1700 mm. Whether or not one accepts that all of this climatic change is driven just, or mainly, by human activity; or by longer-term atmospheric and solar variations; or a complex interaction of many different factors, it seems that we all have to accept that our local weather isn’t as seasonally predictable as it used to be. Massive anomalies of rainfall, heat, sunlight and wind are now likely at frequent intervals, and at any time of the year.

It occurred to me that now the garden is nearing its peak, at least under our stewardship, there would be merit in including my long list compilation of around 220 images, with no words, on a separate page. These seasonal, and in some cases unique observations, remind me why despite all the challenges of the weather, and hard work involved in living in such a challenging climate, we’re incredibly fortunate to be able to experience all of this beauty and drama.

Come to think of it, I might even get this extended compilation printed up in hard copy format as well, for if, or more likely when all my digital data gets corrupted or wiped. As was highlighted by what happened recently to the august British Library.

My musical interest for this blog includes 3 tracks from the recently released, and glorious album ‘Luna’ by Anna Lapwood. I hadn’t read her introduction notes, copied below when I sat down with Fiona and her mother to listen to it for the first time over New Year. I was entranced by just how well all of her choices and arrangements achieved her stated aim:

“One of the highlights of my year is the time I spend teaching music in Zambia. I love it for the people, the music & the laughter, but I also always look forward to the first time I see the Zambian night sky again. You look up and it’s just completely full of stars. Bright stars, dull stars; some twinkling, some static; some glowing orbs and others dots smaller than pinpricks. With this album, I’m imagining we’re standing there, gazing at the sky, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what we can see. I’m imagining that as we stare upwards, our minds can almost take us there, travelling through the night sky and exploring individual stars with their unique personalities and characteristics.” 

For those who don’t know much about her, she was appointed to the role of Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 2016, where she manages more than one choir, but has since gone on to tackle many other roles, including being a fantastic advocate for the pipe organ. If you don’t really know how an organ works, (which I didn’t), watch this summary on YouTube to be enlightened.

It seems to me that she fully deserves her recent MBE in this New Year’s Honours list. She also explains in the CD notes that for her own arrangements or transcriptions of this eclectic choice of pieces, she was very conscious of needing to play not just the particular organ she featured (at the Royal Hospital School in Suffolk). But also the acoustic of this special place, with a nearly 7-second acoustic resonance. The first piece I included above, is briefly explained in this video by Anna:

It’s well worth listening to this music on some decent speakers if you can. I hope it’s as much of a revelation and enjoyable experience for you, as it’s been for me.

And this is indeed the title of the second track I’m featuring. “Experience” by Ludovico Eindaudi. If you play this loud, I swear you’ll feel the room throb with the depth of sound from the 32-foot pipe, perfectly contrasted by Anna’s arrangement with the highest pitch notes. We both love this, and when the Christmas lights were up, we sat in near darkness, and were taken to other worlds. I’m also convinced the deep bass tones will reverberate through the cottage walls and help to deter tunnelling rodents, which are an occasional, though regular challenge in a stone building held together with lime mortar. Here’s a video of Anna playing a shortened version to demonstrate what I mean (just turn the sound up):

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Christmas and the first couple of days of 2024 were very much still locked into the weather pattern of the last half of 2023 – grey, wet, unseasonably mild and with two named storms Gerrit and Henk, bringing some particularly windy conditions as well. We experienced the worst ever driving conditions we can recall in a 6-hour round trip to take Fiona’s mother back to Shropshire, with heavy rain and surface floodwater a near constant concern, having to drive through long sections of flooded road on at least half a dozen occasions.

It was a big relief to return home safely, and once more appreciate living on a hillside, as our stream dramatically flooded the lower field. I was amazed to watch a heron standing on the edge of the still spate swollen streamside, evidently expecting to glimpse something edible in the torrent, and then remembered it was close to the December full moon, so there could well have been another movement of big spawning sea trout powering up the stream. I imagine any smaller fish would have been hunkered down, well out of the main flow in such conditions, but surely a heron wouldn’t be able to see, or take a large salmon out of water like this? And then I found this amazing photo taken by Christine Pears in very similar conditions on a stream in spate in Scotland, of a heron eating a salmon.

Fortunately, the weather then flipped, an anticyclone built, and for nearly a week we’ve enjoyed crisp bright wintry mornings with frosts, temperatures not rising above freezing all day, and at last the landscape began to dry out a little. Even if we were raked with bitterly cold North/Easterly winds. The glorious blue-sky scenes below belie the perceived temperature of minus 8 degrees C as I sat in the shepherd’s hut with the windows closed.

I even made it out early on a couple of mornings, wrapped up well with Beanie, nightshirt, long johns and Wellingtons around 6.15 am. And witnessed the glorious sight of our own dark Welsh skies. And the rising crescent moon above the village, turning a wonderful orange, as was nearby Venus, on January 8th. Well over two hours before the sun sneaked above the rim of the Black Mountain.

There is indeed something special about dawn and the return of daylight.

Even more so at the beginning of a New Year, with all its unimagined possibilities, still unmapped, ahead.

This brings me to my last track, where Anna combines her organ playing with the Pembroke choir in her arrangement of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of daylight”. One of the tracks from Richter’s second album “The Blue Notebooks”, conceived by Richter in 2003 as “a protest album about (the planned war in -sic) Iraq, a meditation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict.” 

 

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Oak leaves have built up in deep piles behind the barn and the back of the house, blown off the garden by Henk’s gales and stacked in new places by the Easterlies. The wonderful early appearance of many snowdrops, crocus and daffodils has been put on hold.

 

Even in the below freezing temperatures, the Daphne bholua thickets are pumping out their sublime scent. And Skimmia ‘Redruth’s berries are, as always, ignored by the hungry blackbirds.

Inevitably, 2024 hasn’t started well for all, and the occasionally glimpsed but rarely photographed sparrowhawk was probably responsible for the demise of one of the fewer winter robins than we normally find around us in the garden. A plucked pile of feathers a reminder of the knife-edge balance of life, that’s evident all around.

Many years ago, around the time we first began opening the garden for the NGS, we used to struggle to have any daffodils in flower for St. David’s Day, March 1st. This year the first Narcissus ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’ appeared on Christmas Eve, and we had about 50 different snowdrop cultivars open by the New Year. Unprecedented precocious phenology.

But all great for lifting the spirits, as is the opportunity to get out in the dry at last and begin the annual tidy up of storm-damaged trees, and a section of hedge laying which I couldn’t complete last year.

I’ve just finished my second effort at a (mainly) weekly record of what we did around the property in 2023 to keep the garden, fields and house in good order. Re-reading my records for January 2023, I noticed that I was potting up some snowdrops then. This season, I completed this task around October/early November, and this is what they looked like at the turn of the year.

Undoubtedly the best-looking selection that I’ve yet managed to achieve.

For anyone who wants to add some snowdrop variety to their winter/spring garden display it’s a great chance to pick up some good ‘doers’ at reasonable prices. (£3.50 to £8). I’m listing the varieties below which will be available for any garden visitors to purchase once we begin opening the garden in February.  Starting on February 3rd.

As always, details about visiting the garden during 2024 are on our separate webpage here.

(The incredibly bold, vigorous and early G. ‘Shropshire Queen’, in the garden on January 10th).

Some are only available in small numbers. All have been propagated by lifting and splitting, rather than chipping, so all are forms which do well in our garden conditions. And as always the majority will probably remain unsold and end up getting replanted in the garden to improve the display in future years. Pictures for most of them can be found on my separate Welsh snowdrop pages.

Here’s the list of available cultivars for 2024:

32-1
Anglesey Not Galatea
Atkinsii
Atkinsii variant ex PW
Augustus
Benton Magnet
Bess
Bitton (Olive ovary)
Colossus
Cornwood
Curly
Daphne’s Scissors
Galadriel
Galatea
George Elwes
Ginn’s byzantinus,
Heffalump (double)
Kildare
Madeleine (yellow)
Melanie Broughton
Ex. Melin Glanffrw (vigorous double)
M Lodge, late dark green form
Modern Art
Mrs Macnamara
Myddleton Giant
Not Trymming
Nothing Special
Percy Picton
Primrose Warburg (yellow)
Richard Ayres (double)
Robin Hood
Rodmarton (double)
S. Arnott
Sarah Dumont (yellow)
Scharlockii
Seagull
Shropshire origin nivalis
Shropshire Queen
Sir Herbert Maxwell
Spindlestone Surprise (yellow)
Trymlet
X Valentinii (Gelli Uchaf origin)
Welsh origin nivalis early/mid form
Welsh origin nivalis early form
Welsh origin nivalis late form

And: Leucojum vernum – snowflake (local very early short form)

I’ve read with some sadness over the last few months, of the possible winding up of Avon Bulbs (AB) this year: historically one of the pre-eminent snowdrop nurseries in the UK. Their lovely annual catalogue of the latest new and very expensive forms is always worth a wistful glance through, when it appears early in the New Year. And disciplined restraint necessary with a modest upper price ceiling, which is why we don’t grow any of the latest, expensive offerings.

Over the years, a fair number of my snowdrop cultivars originated from AB. Quite a few never returned the following year, and quite a few really don’t bulk up with me, so wouldn’t make my own selection as being garden-worthy, at least here. But this December I spotted an unfamiliar one, with broad leaves amongst the tyre garden cultivars, which I didn’t recognise. I checked in my snowdrop notebook, for the tyre number to see if it was a novel Gelli self-sown seedling. Only to discover that it was a named form, G. ‘Warwickshire Gemini’, which I’d apparently bought from AB back in 2015, and which had never flowered, and disappeared until 2022 when I recorded that a few small leaves had grown. What it had been doing in the intervening years, I don’t know. Perhaps eventually it’ll produce the double flowers per scape, which is what inspired its name.

Worth the wait? Or the money?

I’d say not.