Days out with the kids: West Green House Gardens in Hampshire

Let me pique your interest with these beauties...

Come for a walk with me. We're going to West Green House Gardens in Hampshire, a third of the way down the M3...

We'll potter along formal garden paths, boxed by hedges and planted with such an array of beauty that your heart will sing, while your children run around excitedly playing hide & seek...

We'll explore woodland paths too, tickled by ferns and sheltered by boughs laden with all the shades of emerald...

We'll find nooks and outdoor rooms, and every now and then a peek at the house we wished we lived in, the chicken coop that is fancier than any we've ever seen, the statues that surprise us...

And if we're there in spring time, the blossom, oh the blossom. And for tulip lovers (like us), every shade, every form, every delight we could imagine. The children will hop over the channels of water while we soak it all in...

We'll take note of the colours we see, the flowers we love, and vow to take our mothers one day, who would love it so much...

We will show the children the flowers they can smell, the insects buzzing around in spoilt gluttony, let them run down the paths and play hide & seek some more...

And every corner we turn will bring us a fresh view of elegance, of artistry, of wonder. We'll imagine sitting by that fountain in the thirties, cocktail in hand, band playing in the distance. Or pushing open those formerly unlocked gates and strolling, Victorian dress swishing around our ankles, with someone we hope likes us back...

Our families will rest by the lake, searching the depths for signs of fish, watching the ripples as they dance away, looking at their reflections...

If we're there in early spring, the magnolias will be out in all their gravity-defying beauty. We will muse on their bold promise of warmth and daylight to come...

We'll grab an ice cream from the cafe, or sit at one of the pretty little tables, adorned with little pots of flowers, and drink coffee from a filter or tea from a teapot - served as it should be, - drunk with birdsong in the air...

If we're there with our husband, we'll hold hands and talk about life and our plans, delight in our children as they play, and think how lucky we are, and how many blessings we can count...

If we're there with our friends, we'll note the hellebores and bluebells hidden in the flower beds, plan our own gardens, tell each other of how our lives are changing and blossoming too...

Perhaps we'll be lucky enough to be local enough to visit again. Perhaps we'll plan trips to the opera there, staged in the summer, or the garden parties with strings. Perhaps though, like my family and I, we'll know that the chances of us ever passing by again are so very small, and instead we'll take photographs, breathe it all in, and then write a little about it to tell you that if you can't come with us, go with your own loved ones instead. It is heavenly.

Spring has sprung

Yes it rains a lot, and gosh hasn't it been windy? But every few days we wake up to this:

And though the frost is there, the sun is singing that old song, "Morning has broken....", and I know it won't be long before the frost turns back to dancing beads of dew. If I step outside to look at that rising sun - and I often do - the birds are carolling about it at the top of their little lungs, as if they too feel like skipping.

We take a walk along the river that runs through our village, and the stream too is singing in its babbling voice, chuckling to itself with the glee of new life. The riverbanks are still largely void of growth, but look closer and you'll see that the sunshine with its warm breath has blown a message into the soil, and shoots are appearing. Trees are beginning to bud. Rabbits are scampering in the still-vacant campsite. And the birds are still singing in giddy chorus.

Walk a little further, away from the shade of the riverbank, and these glorious fellows meet you. That's my littlest, the Tiny One, in the distance there. He's exploring the farm lane, looking for new spring flowers, searching for lambs in the fields, grabbing every stick he can find with his brother.

It's such a good time of year. Everything has promise, hope and beginnings. While the winds are still often cold and the frosts plenty, the rains still flying in our faces; even on these days the nature around us is standing firm and believing in the spring days to come.

Bringing nature in: walking, foraging, collecting and displaying - the journey of myevergreen sprigs

We walk a lot with our children. If they're not in school, we're off out with them. We love the outdoors; but on a purely practical note, we have boys and they need a daily dose of fresh air and exercise to stop us all going crazy! And sometimes when we walk, when my kitchen table is a little bare and I need a little outside in my indoors, I go armed with a shoulder bag and a pair of secateurs.

I have a theme in mind: wild flowers, seed heads, or in this case evergreens. There's not much about in January but the often ignored evergreens are sculptural and succulent, making a great centrepiece. Cut a sprig of holly here, some laurel there, ivy with its buds out, pine for its needles. Wear gloves: it's cold but a lot of your fodder is prickly. Cut the right sort of length for your vase and don't take more than you need - apart from anything else, detangling it all from your bag is a nightmare if you've not loosely packed!

Come home, warm up, put the kettle on. Fill your jug with water and detangle those evergreen sprigs that you've foraged. Arrange them in your vase, and suddenly your kitchen is - for free, yes, gratis people - adorned with a bit of the outside, a bit of nature, a bit of life. They'll be happy for several weeks if you're lucky. And so will you. 

Let's make a Home Nature Table with the kids - in 10 easy steps

Well hello autumn! And this is our goodbye to the summer: a nature table in our home, made by my children.

So for those of you who have young children and have spent a good deal of your summer holidays out and about, walking, playing, in the woods, at the beach, on the hills... I bet your hallway looks like this every time you get back:

So did mine. Repeatedly. And after twice catching my husband trying to bin all our finds only a day later, I decided to act. We took what had been lovingly collected but carelessly discarded and actually made it into something beautiful and memorable: a home nature table. Want one too? Then let's get started...

1// Find yourself an under-used table, ideally a low one, made for children. Cover it with some fabric or a tablecloth that will make it feel special and present your finds nicely.

2// Group your nature finds by type and look for some nice containers to vary the height and presentation for each. We put our feathers in an old golden syrup tin. (That's the Tiny One's hand in action)

3// Pine cones look best in a bowl (if you have lots like we did) or a clear jar. That's the Little One proudly placing his big bowl at the back.

4// Use a jar or vase to arrange your leafy twigs just as you would a bunch of flowers.

5// I resisted the urge to do some artful arrangement, so this is the Little One and the Tiny One squeezing every fallen oak twig and random stick they had collected into my little jam jar. They did a fab job.

6// We then placed our beach drift wood and pine cone twigs lying down a the front, for a bit of height variation.

7// The Tiny One chose his favourite beach stones for his favourite blue bowl (there are another few dozen decorating our garden!)

8// And the Little One chose his favourites for his best yellow bowl.

9// Ta da! When we'd finished arranging everything we stood back, had a few proud photographs, then realising we were missing something. What's a nature table without a bit of naturalist labelling?! It had been a long time since the Little One had practiced his writing so we sounded out the letters together while he wrote each label. It was a great opportunity to introduce a bit of literacy without it feeling like homework.

10// We placed the labels by each of our finds and were done! The boys were so excited to show their daddy when he came home. And my hallway is remarkably tidy!

Ps thank you to those of your who took the time to leave kind comments on my last post. They worked!

Wandering: visiting the National Trust's Speke Hall in Liverpool

We bought a family one-year National Trust membership and it was one of the best investments we've made for our family. This is because we use it. Every weekendwe have time for a family day out, we consult the National Trust map and off we go. Nice day? Somewhere with lots of outdoor space to explore and picnic in. Less nice? A house that will take time to look round, with activities for younger children. Meeting with friends? Yep, we National Trust it. We can't afford to be members every year so we go crazy with the National Trust properties while we can, then take a few years off until the boys are older and it's all fresh again.

A week or so ago we visited Speke Hall in Liverpool.

It's a beautiful Tudor property set in landscaped grounds, surrounded by a wood. And it has something extra that I don't think any other National Trust places have... it's right next to an airport. So you get the added extra of - wow! - aeroplanes taking off above you. It really helps to have a bit of variety to entertain little ones! So, I guess you want to hear some of the other plusses? We really did have a fabulous day out with our friends.

The architecture is beautiful. For us 'grown-ups', from every angle there's something new to look at and different buildings to appreciate. For your children, there are little carved faces where you don't expect it, a moat (now grassed) to run round or roll down, and the house itself is just the right scale for littler ones.

There are lots of nooks and crannies to explore, and woodland walks to take. Because the scale is smaller than a lot of the grand National Trust properties you may have visited, it is much more suited to little legs and it is much better for more independent exploring. As parents, you want your children to learn the thrill and the responsibility of being independent from you, but that desire clashes against a primal need to watch over them and protect them. Speke Hall just felt like the perfect place to find a harmony between those two needs.

The house itself is beautiful. Unlike more museum-like places, it was set up with signs of life (like this Singer sewing machine - you can't expect me to ignore a sewing machine!) as though the Victorian inhabitants of this Tudor manor had just downed tools and popped outside for a moment.

There was a great trail indoors for the children to do. I thought my then-two-year-old and four-year old would be too young but they weren't at all. The house was just disrobing itself from its winter hibernation, and so most rooms had a large, hidden picture of a bug in them that you had to find (huge fun at that age) and note in your little booklet. The Little One loved practicing his writing (b-e-d) and the Tiny One liked the funny bug names and their descriptions.

We all loved looking for signs of spring in the kitchen garden and on the woodland walk. They loved climbing in the playground near the entrance (blowing off those long-car-drive cobwebs) while watching planes soar overhead. They loved the second, surprise woodland playground even more - tree trunk steps, zip wires, climbing frames, houses. It was always close to rain but we managed to miss it. It was cold enough to legitimately deny the ice-cream pleas (why is a cake never enough?!) but throw the coats off while running across the grass. We managed a picnic (coats on). We were home in time for tea.

You really should go.

Wandering: January walk by the reservoir

Just look at that:

We went for a walk along the reservoir with the boys. There are many reservoirs around here, pooling in the clefts of the Peaks, but this is our favourite for a little walk with little ones. There's a sailing club at its edge, which means we sometimes get to see races. It can be still as a millpond, like today, or choppy like the sea. A little path runs alongside it, on a wooded ridge between the reservoir and the stream, and next to that we occasionally pass beautiful waters edge houses that you would dream to live in. Sometimes, like today, we also walk along the reservoir dam, marvelling at the steep grassy slope to the other side and the fast rush of channeled water heading down to the natural river below. I tell you, Ratty and Moley would have the fright of their lives if their nonchalent river boat raced down those rapids.

The sun was not far off setting, but the birds and wildfowl did not seem ready for bed yet, and neither did the fishermen we passed. Neither did our boys for that matter. They consider this exploring territory. And there was the amazing skate ramps in the park at the other side. We had to drag the two-year-old away kicking and screaming, quite literally, as he just could not bear to leave the sight of the crazy Big Boys defying gravity on their BMX's. Something for everyone.

I should've taken a photo of them, but it didn't seem quite right to snap strangers and then stick them on the web, especially other peoples' children! Have a silhouette of a fisherman instead.

Wandering: From summer to autumn

We took our regular, twenty-minutes-on-our-own, double-that-with-curious-little-ones walk a couple of weeks ago. The trees were mostly dressed in green, with the odd bit of amber jewellery: dipping their toes in the water of autumn styling.

Rowan trees abundant with huge fistfuls of fruit, a sign of the bountiful nut harvest to come from their woodland neighbours. It truly, and gratefully, is a mast year.

It seems like every time we go for a walk, I take a photo of the sky through the veil of tree foliage. Everyone has a favourite, soulful place. My mum's is on the beach, probably on a spring or autumn day, looking for shells and doughnut stones. Mine is on a wooded walk, stream in my ears, birds in song, hedgerows resplendent in the varied bounty of the English countryside. I could not live anywhere without a host of trees and a stream running through it. Luckily I live here.

And the times, they are a'changin'

I want to talk a little about autumn, but I'm afraid you're going to have to put up with some rubbish mobile phone pictures to go along with my wonderings. I really need to get around to reading my phone's camera instructions. Or nagging my husband to bring his camera everywhere we go.

The trees above are just a month apart, but look at the difference. I've read elsewhere on the web that the autumn colours are disappointing this year, but those thoughts are coming from bloggers in the south of the UK. Up here in the north, things are glorious. There seems to be much more yellow than usual, in beautiful oil-paint vibrancy. Autumn has been slow, too, with a hesitancy to move through to full-on winter and not enough storms to blow all the leaves away. The lingering is much appreciated. I'm looking up everywhere I go. I'm enjoying it with feet in crisp cornflake-like leaf fall, and eyes in the deep yellow hues of a revelling autumn. My nose always accepts an invite too, for there is that beautiful mulchy decay in the crisp air, and wafts of wood fire waiting to surprise you as you go.

It's such an amazing time of year for walking. Oh you just have to get out in the woods, accept the mud that cakes your walking boots and buggy wheels, and take scarves and gloves that will be peeled off in the autumn sunshine. It's not just the leaves that delight, but there have been fungi treats everywhere. I can't help but look out for them. On trees, in grasses, wherever the damp and decaying can be found. Every time I wish I'd brought a mushroom book with me. My favourites are the bubbling mountains of frogspawn-like blush fungi like in the photo above, right. Or the giant crescents that grow out from trees above your head, like a shelter from a storm. 

We enjoyed the berry season so much, mostly on the hoof as it's pretty hard to get a small child to pop a jewel of candy-like blackberry delight into a box to take home rather than their mouth. Now I'm seeing the shrivelled, dried-out remains of the blackberries that were ignored or forgotten, and will give themselves back to nature. The undergrowth is thinning and the evergreens, hardly noticed the rest of the year, are starting to show off again. The robins seem so much more profuse, although they were here all summer long, and I choose to conveniently forget that they are not the sweet, timid little creatures we like to think they are. Autumn is, after all, as much a fantasy of our concoction as a reality of decay and Darwinian dances. 

Every year in spring I think, "no, I was wrong about autumn and this definitely is the best season". Come every autumn, my allegiance changes again and I crown it king. I like these two changing seasons the most, when the world wakes up and then goes to sleep again.

 

The pine cones, acorns, spinning jennies and conkers are the jewels I'm coveting now. I want a cape of crisp autumn leaves, mustard-coloured like so much of the tree decor this year. I want a crown of mushrooms with a robin on top. Well, I accept I'd look just a tad ridiculous. I shall just have to put on my outdoor gear and go kick leaves.