At last! March has broken the weather run that stretches back an awfully long way, into 2023. We’ve enjoyed multiple dry days in a row, with just enough rain to keep the soil moist. And a fair bit of sunshine, even if overnight frosts have been frequent.

St. David’s Day, which fell on the Saturday of our second successful weekend of National Garden Scheme (NGS) garden opening for 2025 began with a wonderful dawn chorus, heralded by a song thrush singing very close to the house. With little wind and almost no traffic, I took a lot of video footage and made the long YouTube, below, focused around the clarity and purity of this bird song.

It was almost as if the birds, like us, had been waiting for such a moment for so long, and now that it had arrived, they were going to sing their hearts out. I debated how to edit some very long scenes with such special song and no detracting external noise. Even the transatlantic jets, which often curtail such recordings, kept away. I know that few will bother to listen to the end of this 10 minute piece, but for me, this is immensely relaxing, and one doesn’t even need the visual stimulus to change. Which is why some of the very slowly zooming shots have been intentionally included. Locating the actual song thrush doing the singing is usually quite tricky. In the end I managed a few distant views, as it faced the sunrise.

Thanks to our friend Paula, a fellow NGS garden owner, and our lovely NGS county social media organiser for alerting me to the ‘Merlin’ bird song identification app. She used hers to come up with the following list of birds which the app identified from the video: blackbird, song thrush, house sparrow, robin, redwing, great tit, wren, nuthatch, goldfinch, pied wagtail and a mistle thrush, plus a very faint tawny owl and woodpecker.

Fiona now has added ‘Merlin’ to her Smartphone, since it’s so much better than her previous app in quickly bringing up a possible ID and image of the bird, as the song is detected from its on-device data base. It also reminded me that for all my resistance to owning a Smartphone, these devices do have some benefits!

 

Such a dramatic start to the month, along with my niece spotting an active lizard rustling through vegetation on the preceding, last day, of February, got me having a go at another acrostic poem for this month. Perhaps I’ll try this for every month of the year.

March Morn

 

March morn, frost’s scorn, sprung spring, clipped wings

Arcing sun, lizards run, torpor shed, hunger led

Rushed thrush, dawn’s thrum, dusk’s drum, heart’s thrill

Crocus clasped, crystal grasped, melting power, purple shower

Happy bees, flowers seized, nectar sipped, pollen shipped.

 

02/03/2025

I rattled off another video, below, to try to capture the stage the garden had reached by the following week and just before another small group of visitors from a local U3A group in Llanelli had booked in to visit the garden. Something of a change in style for me with this one, but it followed a suggestion from Paula that she’d really like something no more than 90 seconds – which I already knew is the maximum for most people’s on-line concentration span these days. It had to to be an exercise in speedy filming and speedy editing, and something I’ll try to repeat, (about 4 hours in total!) to paint a picture of how quickly the garden changes at this time of the year.

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I can now confirm that the visit by a TV crew has just been transmitted by ITV as part of the latest, episode 2 of series 13 of their ‘Coast and Country’ show. Which is available to watch on this link. The section on Gelli Uchaf runs from about 17.00 minutes, should anyone be interested. We salute Kelsey, Hannah and James’ up-beat efficiency, focus, patience and enthusiasm on the day. This would have been followed by a lot of behind-the-scenes work by their team in editing all the footage they took during their time with us into their coherent filmed story. Adding in music, dubbing and general tweaking. We think it’s a wonderful take on both the journey we’ve been on for over 30 years, as well as the inspiration that living here brings not just to us, but many of our lovely visitors.

What I didn’t mention, when I touched on their visit in a previous post was that what I most dreaded was whether they’d use the footage they’d taken of me playing the piano. The researchers had clearly done their homework from our webpage about who we both are, and our interests. But what they didn’t know is that for all sorts of reasons my piano playing had dribbled away to nothing for much of last year, only tentatively reviving after we’d begun to have our A.G.O.G. meetings, when Mark and Phil’s guitar playing made me think I should start playing again.

Since none of my compositions are written down anywhere, such a long gap without touching the keyboard presented major problems: with me trying to remember them! But I was gradually rediscovering some by trial and error. Even so, it was very weird that something made me play for about 5 minutes on the morning of their visit before they arrived – for the first time in several days. So that when Kelsey said “Right, Julian, now we’d like to record you playing the piano”, I didn’t take the easy route out and decline, which would have been wiser, perhaps. I can confirm that some very skilful sound editing and photography have produced something which isn’t a complete auditory disaster, and does indeed record that this actually happened.

For any serious pianists (like James, the marvellous cameraman and hugely talented composer/pianist, ex Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama) who might listen to the recording of me, hunched up, in mitigation do bear in mind that I only began playing after I’d retired, as a new challenge. The snippet they recorded was the first thing that came into my head after Hannah encouraged me to play with the camera filming – my own take on what will be probably be a familiar track to many. The Lighthouse Family’s medley cover of the 1960’s song Free – (I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be) Free/One. I discovered this excellent video in following up on the song’s history:

Written as a jazz work, without lyrics, as simply “I wish I knew”, by the American Billy Taylor, it was first recorded by him in November 1963. With lyrics later added by Dick Dallas, it became a popular anthem for the American civil Rights movement in the 1960’s and was popularised by the version from 1967, sung here by Nina Simone 

The Lighthouse Family version, above, spliced Taylor’s song onto a chorus plucked from the U2 song “One”. It was released in November 2001, from their third studio album. “Whatever gets you through the day”. I’ve just ordered this recent compilation,  Essential Lighthouse Family Box Set of 3 CD’s which seems to be a bargain.

The lyrics always struck a chord with me, and the tune was simple enough for me to be able to work at, and play around with in my basic piano playing style. What only occurred to me after watching their YouTube a few times was how clever and appropriate the group’s video was for the lyrics. And then, a bit later, how of its time this video is.

All those people on a subway train. Lost in their own head spaces. Isolated lives, and hidden thoughts. No communication between them. (Mainly) no engagement with fellow travellers. Their lives above ground hidden from view, and temporarily of another world. All wishing to be free. From something.

 I wish I could be like a bird in the sky.
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly.
Well I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea,
Then I’d sing ‘cos I know
How it feels to be free.

In fact how every subway/metro train always used to be, on the few occasions we jumped on them in Paris, or (more rarely) London.

And then along came mobile devices. And all that downtime/thinking time? Simply vanished. To be replaced by feverish, eyes down scrolling and texting, or headphone music. Mmmm. Progress, eh?

And the last point about the group that intrigued me was their name: click on this article to discover the ‘chance’ events that drew the duo together, and how their name was settled upon. 

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The A.g.o.g meetings have continued with a great diversity of topics in the last 2 sessions which have been very enjoyable and mind stretching.

Here are a few of the links in the order they were raised from the last meeting:

Sandy Denny, a wonderful folk singer I’d never heard of before, with a tragically short life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOI6Xd8Jinw with Led Zeppelin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Denny

Astronomy pictures from one of the g.o.gs – amazing – as well as their insight into how they were taken/processed, and all the different celestial scenes that had been seen over these last few days with clear night skies.
Then there was the award winning BRAT album. Samples available here….
(I did give it a go…!)
And two films which I’ve still to look at, and can’t remember their names (sorry).

Spells… 2 great books, well worth getting at least one.

and The Lost spells

And a part viewed link to the one-of-a-kind Malcom Guite talking about these books and reading his own poem.

And this YouTube of the amazing, missing-a-finger, American guitarist Phil Keaggy, who I discovered through Guite’s channel..

And finally, the three fascinating books by Rev J Aelwyn Roberts. The books he wrote in English were, Privies of Wales, The Holy Ghostbuster and Yesterday’s People, (he also wrote three books in Welsh and one in Portugese). He died in 2019 aged 99. He was the vicar of Llandegai for 36 years after graduating from Lampeter University in 1940.

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The other musical interlude for this post is based around the final piece played at the recent Rhosygilwen piano recital by Sofia Gulyak at the end of February. The first female pianist to win the prestigious Leeds international piano competition, in 2009, she is a phenomenally accomplished pianist, but most of the pieces were unfamiliar to us, and not in our preferred more romantic style. Several were loud and fast transcriptions of Bach organ music, reworked for the piano. Click here for an idea of her technique and what we listened to in the beginning of this concert, and at Rhosygilwen..

However, the final piece she performed was another of those tracks from the “Festival of Light Classical Music”: my parent’s boxed set of vinyl which I’ve referenced before in my blog posts. These records were in big part responsible for opening my ears to the drama of classical music as a young teenager when I’d consult the track listings, pull out a disc, set the stylus down on the old record player, and lay on the sitting room carpet and be taken to other worlds.

However, I’m sure we’d never heard Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2  played live before on a piano — which is how the piece was first composed and scored. Sitting in the front row, as one can at Rhosygilwen, just feet from the blurring fingers is quite an experience. Played, below, as an encore to a concert by the Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, one gets a similar insight into the music’s complexity. Extraordinary dramatic orchestral music created by a single pair of hands on a piano. And if you make it to the end, watch for the quick hitch. Phew.

Should her rather too glamorous attire be a distraction, you could opt instead for the Tom and Jerry version, below. We grew up with Tom and Jerry cartoons on family TV and I’m amazed by how inventive and clever they still look, all those years after they were carefully drawn, frame by frame, in 1947. No CGI here, folks.

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Whilst we just missed seeing the eclipsed full blood moon at dawn this week, as cloud rolled in from the West at just the wrong moment around 5.a.m. we did have a clear view of the full moon at dusk, as did a riveted blackbird, still for minutes on end, just quiet and watching.

Then even better, when I rolled out of bed after a minus 3 Degrees C frost, I found our first lamb of the year, born to one of our favourite ewes, Itzim. Itzim has a gorgeous soft white fleece, unusual for our Tor Ddu sheep. In addition, she never takes any supplementary feed throughout the winter until she’s given birth, as well as being a bit of a loner, always grazing away from the rest of the flock. However her best trait is she’s completely calm and unfazed by our presence. All of these are traits she seems to have inherited from her mum. Since her lamb is also a ewe, she’s already been given her ‘L’ prefixed daffodil name – ‘Lalique’. Which we already grow in the garden and is a distinctive large, later-flowering, pearly primrose/ white daffodil.

Their daffodil alter egos: Itzim, above, and Lalique, below

I’ve just begun re-reading my 2 excellent daffodil books, which I’ve mentioned on these blog posts before, in advance of another very interesting project likely to happen towards the end of this month, or early April. Hopefully more about this in due course. (Daffodils – Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill, and “Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower” by Noel Kingsbury and photographer Jo Whitworth)

Meantime, I’ve been delighted by how many daffodil flowers are appearing at the top of our upper hay meadow this year. Well over 350. To the casual observer, they all look similar short, bicoloured flowers. But look a little closer, and there’s considerable variation in trumpet and ‘petal’ colour, shape and size. More than enough for any snowdrop fancier to rank them as distinctive bulbs, aside from their different flowering times. Given that most of these will have taken at least 5 years to produce their first flower from the date I scattered the saved seed into the field, and given this is something I’ve continued to do, every year since, I’d hope that in a couple of years, there will be well over 1,000. At this point they’ll begin to make a bit more visual impact.

Although even now, sitting on the steps of the shepherd’s hut on a chilly afternoon, they’re a lovely sight. Nearly all of these could be classified as Narcissus pseudonarcissus forms, since most will have come from seed collected from parents of this species. However in the early days, several may have been the result of me hand pollinating the flowers with pollen from other early daffodils we grow, like N.’Topolino’ .

At the previous A.g.o.g. meeting, I’d featured ‘The Roses of Heligobalus’, an extraordinary painting from 1888 which we’d seen, by chance, in real life in 2013, and painted by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Which I discussed years ago on this blog post.

Re-reading Helen O’Neill’s beautiful book, I came across an image of one of Alma-Tadema’s last works painted in about 1911, which seems appropriate to include in this blog post.

And titled ‘When Flowers Return’.

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Finally, I can give an update on our Renogy portable suitcase PV panel, which has been set up on many days so far this month. It’s certainly quite quick and easy to transport and prop up using our metal chair backs, or even the wall of the house first thing in the morning. I usually try to move the panel a couple of times throughout the day, and have been impressed that on more than one occasion, I’ve had outputs into the Anker Power station of OVER the rated 400 watts of the panel. Despite obvious transmission losses through an over-long 42 foot inter-connecting cable, which was the only one we could buy at the time.

The downside to its use is that in very cold or breezy weather, the door has to be propped ajar a little to allow the flex through. There’s not an easy fix for this, unless I took the rather brutal step of drilling a hole through the door frame to allow the cable to be fed or slotted through. Because of the diameter of the connector plugs which fits onto the reverse fitting on the PV panel, this would need to be at least 1 cm diameter. Is it worth doing this? Possibly, if a decent fitting could be fashioned for plugging this hole when the panel is not in use and the cable isn’t required.

It’s amazed me how very early in the day, it can generate 150 W, and often nearly as much as the 3800W rated fixed panel array we have above the house. Mainly because the panels can be positioned to face the sun at a near optimum 90 degree angle to the sun, in two planes, simultaneously. Something that never happens with fixed PV installations. There’s clearly minimal economic advantage from all this hassle, but it’s satisfying to generate a little power in this way and know that at least now in a prolonged power outage we’d have some access to limited amounts of electricity.