Our gardening angel, Avril, has been sawing down branches and trimming hedges; work that has been desperately needed now for several years. In the photos above, you can see her cutting off two huge branches that stuck out a long way into the garden and overshadowed one of the beds. She left the fork with two stumps sticking out as a comfortable perch for small boys! I might try to carve the ends into faces! Look out for more on the story of the tree seat.
While Avril worked on the hedge bordering the lonning, Mike cut some huge overhanging sections from the multi-stemmed cherry by the roadside. He kept having nightmares that it would fall across the road one day and cause an accident. While he chopped up the resulting logs, I stacked them on the veranda of the cabin- an ideal place for a proper woodpile. Hopefully by next winter, it will be stacked full, and should make us self- sufficient in wood.
Yesterday was a perfect winter's day, blue and warm with a slight haze, lulling you into a false sense that spring was almost here, but as the shadows lengthened, the cold found ingenious ways to bypass our defenses and remind us that winter is far from over, and there will be cold and wet days a plenty to come.
