The moon looked like it was in a haze last night yet again and indeed it was all for the wrong reasons due to the smoke of the fires engulfing both Europe's and Canadas forests. Its stomach churning to see what is happening with the knowledge of what this global reduction of trees will entail.

I wanted though to recommend if its feeling too much right now and it is and will become too much for us all soon as everything David Attenborough said in his Life on our planet film is rapidly coming of course true, stop watching the cack of social media ‘celeb’ we thought we’d share how we met cringe-vile and re-discover the BBC series of Who do you think you are?

I’ve been poorly in bed for the past 3 days and have found some of them to be oddly moving. I think increasingly going back to watch anything in the near past that did not involve mobile phones is a tonic and the series has within its archive some true greats.

Perhaps my favourite is Jane Horrock’s episode. I don’t know if they are on BBC iplayer but I found them on youtube - watch here These films are really quite fly on the wall insights into the lives of those taking part, their past families of course but also to their lives too and they give a refreshing curiosity you think oh they aren’t green fingered then, oh that’s a nice front door oh look they are sat in first class now on that train I wonder if production did that or if they did!? God I miss the 2000’s.

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It did not really feel like Derbyshire, a place I remember as often being wet during the summer holidays. A place of endless paddling, of looking for curious bullyhead fishes in the river Derwent and of stepping in toddler awe of the magic of flowing water on the steps of the cascade. The sun beat down onto the open and grazed grass soon to fry it beyond any shade that could be considered as green and into parched brown before my eyes.

The place, Chatsworth which is of some 1,000 acres was quiet. The sheep silently mulling and beautifully shorn under the trees and the usual but brave shadows of walkers making their ways along the road to the house. Although it was before the rush of the summer holidays and the heat puts most of those with dogs off from being about the place, wisely.

I’d travelled up from the Cotswolds via Swindon station so such egg drop offs as I class them are long but good pilgrimage like days. I get a huge sense of odd purpose in a life that increasingly feels very lost by coming here. I think if the world does start to set on fire, fully as its predicted to do so, I’d like to somehow get to Chatsworth and end my time here under the gaze of Flora in her Temple with a vile of Heracelum mantegazzianum. Although hogweed death is not at all nice, at least according to Midsommer Murders so I do think as gardeners that we have a responsibility to seek out plants that will cope with the Armageddon to come and offer us kinder ends.

As by this point I won’t have a phone to document it so I may as well write it here for you to envisage, as it will be very hot I’ll be almost naked and beautifully thin tanned into another genre in vanilla stained and torn linen.

I think the sun and heat makes romantic emotions run very high whether they are about people or nature. I think of the scene in HBO’s epic and very well done, stella casted Rome series where Polly Walker who plays Atia, the lover of Mark Antony played by James Purefoy has to gaze at his dead and mummified body being dragged through Rome under showers of rose petals and cheering crowds owing to the victory of her son, the emperor . It had a very good soundtrack as I remember and Lyndsey Marshal played Cleopatra stunningly. Its funny what hot stone and pillars conjure my minds televised, period and historical drama mind to spotlight on. ‘They’ll feed us to the crocodiles’

One of my most favourite photos that I’ve ever taken is of Flora, a few years ago now but it was a sunny and hot day. It would be sad to think of Flora who is of the Danish sculpture Caius Cibber’s work being out in the garden like the many other works but originally she would have been admired on the Parterre before being placed in her temple 1760. She was then sent to the rose garden by the 6th Duke in 1813 but was returned to her temple with its pillars restored after some 180 years in 1993, a year after my birth. Anyone can go and sit in the shade of her temple once in the gardens and the alcoves of it are cheered at this time of year with terracotta pots of white geraniums. Simple but effortlessly chic.

I dashed through on this occasion, gazed and mentally said hello to Flora before venturing into the Orangery shop. I was on a quest for the very good turkish delight that Chatsworth do but as I was to later find in the Nottingham mini Waitrose, the fridge that stored the confectionary was not coping and so was off and empty.

Luckily the stables shop being cooler and darker had the dark chocolate truffles that I take back to James. He gets two boxes, one for home and one for his office. I am not as crazed by dark chocolate as I am by milk so usually they are bought and safely ignored until I present them to him but what half melted state this rucksack carried offering of balls are to resemble this occasion I dread to think. I also bought myself a new sun hat by Barbour.

This year has not been the best for the hatching of the Buff Cochins, giant champagne birds who are in the chicken class of being themselves creations of chocolate teapots. We have managed to hatch, between Samantha at the farmyard and myself this year, some 15 precious chicks.

They take a long time to grow into themselves, first come their plumed trouser bottom feathers that they wonder about on. This year it looks like I have mostly cockerels which is the typical norm and beast of hatching eggs, with luck some will find homes. Those that do not will meet an end concerning that of Russian tarragon as costly reared to table sized 8 month old adult birds. The tarragon I have grown from seed this year at first with excitement, although to me it looks weedy and does not seem to taste or smell of that much at all.

The eggs I took last week are the last of this year so I hope the majority might hatch and rear well. The cochins were once reared in decent numbers at Chatsworth for many years and sold each October as being the favourites of her Grace Deborah Devonshire. Despite such sales of pullets, no one in Derbyshire today keeps them to my knowledge and I have the last of the very strain of birds descended from those once kept and shown by the Duchess. And so its very lovely to be still trying to keep these rare chickens at large here. Hens do not love the heat or the full sun, they like to be under the shade and mine are quick to shelter under these shelters that I have of black onduline roofing sheets off the ground by about a foot on wooden frames.

I really do need to learn that if I arrive at Chatsworth by 2pm by bus from Chesterfield station that there will not be another one until 5pm as the buses don’t run during the school rush hours.

The Bus being a double decker gives the best view as it zooms into the estate, eye to eye with the crowns of oak trees who are in all honesty no douby screaming, in the fashion of trees for a good drop of rain. Alas we know this probably will not come for weeks. I hope for all our sakes sooner but today as I write this it is St.Swithin’s day and according to old folk law, the weather today will be the same for the next forty days and nights. I could cope with the heat and sun if we got the rain our little isle needs to be a green and pleasant land rather than what’s becoming a land of winter monsoons and desert summers.

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Best Arthur

For those who haven’t a clue what the mentions are, Goldtops are the living article of Beatrix Potter’s Sally Henny Penny.

They are known for their qualities of being good and reliable broody hens. They are mongrels really but have a pattern of lemon to creamy white bodies and usually black neck plumage. The latter distinction is owed due to their parentage being that of a Light Sussex hen being crossed with a golden silkie cockerel. Both of these pure breeds have a tendency to go broody but pure breed silkies have very fine almost fur like feathers. This runs a risk of chicks occasionally being strangled as they snuggle into the hens body at night and so this cross breed has all the maternal want but not the more fur like risk.

Call ducks meanwhile are dumpy little meringue pie bantam like shapes amongst waterfowl with tiny, adorable lolly stick rounded ends for beaks and they never shut up, hence their name.

After the threat of bird flu and the entitled Defra mandatory address registry, allowing a government gas tank of carbon dioxide to turn up at your given address to strip you of your rare breeds at any time, in what can honestly be considered as a hand over fist defence of intensive farming and its identical genetics that hand in hand cultivate such disease, it was refreshing to be able to visit some fellow fanciers today whom had advertised some hens for sale.

Rearing animals is a lonely pursuit often and that is why country shows and poultry pavilions bring such joy to many a ‘fowler’ as people can meet up at such occasions to talk chickens at length. For now the banning of poultry shows has been lifted, thanks to much effort from individuals of the Poultry Club. Chickens were in attendance at the Cornwall Royal show this past month for the first time in almost 5 years. It surely cannot be considered to be a proper country show without a well stocked poultry pavilion after all! Hopefully many more shows will occur this year.

Barry and his wife who I met today clearly adored their birds, mostly they reared bantams, all in beautifully grassy little pens. Interestingly they had the omlett houses and runs at large and after this summer, red mite has been a pain in the wooden houses I have. I am going to be switching over to more mite resistant plastic houses too.

I had to stop myself from being a child in sweetshop as they had young silver Sebright bantams that are so very, very beautiful with their black and white lacing so very neat but sense prevailed as my bit of land in the depths of winter is not really the place for such little bodies to truly thrive in and it would have meant another pen to attend to.

You have to be quite strict when it comes to poultry breeding as otherwise you end up with too many birds and breeds of this and that and then none of which you really have proper time to devote to.

The goldtop hens that I have bought today are all very pretty but their purpose is to help me in hatching the Buff Cochin eggs better going forward as they have the sense to be steady sitters, here’s hoping.

It’s getting late in the year now to be hatching as for chicks to grow well they do best when the weather is good and the grass is freshly growing. On the 10th of this month or possibly the 9th, I will take the last lot of Cochin eggs to Chatsworth with the hopes of the farmyard hatching a few more precious ones. Each day the saved eggs are turned over end over end so they don’t stick to one side of their shells as they await this journey and the incubator. Its a good job a Chatsworth visit is on the cards as the stock of marizpan fruits is down to a trio of a raspberry, peach and lime. These truly are the finest!

best Arthur x

Arthur Parkinson does get asked to go to ‘things’ usually on instagram. Arthur Parkinson largely on account of him being selectively busy, lazy, stubborn and reclusive, usually and politely declines.

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Do come and celebrate the opening/ launch of… ugh of course its in bloody London. Do I need to? Who might be there that I’d rather not have to see? Will it result in a decent photo of me ending up on Getty images? Will it help the poor agent see that I am attempting to network and be something? Every little helps for this life on the Z author list after all, I think anyway.

Often I arrive to such things in a timid state and I immediately think get me out of here, I’m getting out of here. Within seconds, this stirring of unsettled feeling becomes visual. Red faced and damp palmed, the shirt I chose making me hotter and hotter and not in a sexy way. I look at my nails and think for god sake couldn’t you have tried harder with that bloody nail brush?

This past week though, I attended something that I genuinely wanted to do and was honoured to be asked to take part in. I’ve been on a safari, in north Yorkshire! Its been in my diary since last year.

I have commented about where I am living in the country in previous posts. A place of country roads that lead to sourdough bakeries, delicious pubs and affluent farm shops and garden centres for the London and now American elite with my personal catch phase of ‘ every Friday afternoon it is Waitrose delivery van time’.

And yet these little green and white vans filled with weekend pots of humous bundle past fields where set aside and organic farming principles see coveys of our native Grey partridge managing to eek out a rare living. These birds are very marital family oriented little bundles of shy energy, sweet yet strong and they are at much peril.

Organic farming principles are essential for them as their chicks require insects on hatching to feather up into what is known, in game bird terminology as a covey. This is when mother, father and a grown brood of partridge chicks numbering at a dozen or hopefully more, run and flutter quickly about in unison. It is a wonderful thing to witness.

If a male grey partridge looses his mate then he will be a sorrowful soul for months, calling out for a female who will never return with no guarantee of him having time to find a new mate. Their lives are rich in emotional trials by fire behind their modest first appearances of bobbing and pecking about.

They may get a small amount of lime light at Christmas with depictions of them atop of pear trees but nine times of out ten, the illustrations will be of a red legged and zebra stripped French partridge.

This is the sweet cousin of the Grey partridge but it is far, far more profuse in its population and more confident, at this time of year they buzz about the roads daringly in pairs. Emma Bridgewater’s newly re-illustrated range of British bird pottery has made a poor judgement of including a French rather than that of an English grey partridge this spring!

Whilst Instagram scrolling, I came across a very beautiful film of Grey Partridges filmed beautifully by Tarquin Millington- Drake, a man who is doing more for the grey partridge arguably than the whole of the RSPB and most certainly BBC’s Spring Watch in his efforts to raise awareness for them.

I shared his films of the partridges to my story and then he messaged me introducing himself. To my surprise he lived in the neighbouring village and the partridges he was filming were very likely to be the same ones I saw now and then whilst cycling. We met for a drink and chatted all things partridges and game with promised illustrations that to my shame I have yet to attempt but I must, so far I have managed a few pheasants that I am sort of half allured to. see below.

The beautiful photos here are taken by Tarquin and his videos can be viewed via his instagram, here is his substack - In fact he adores these birds so much that he has published a book about them too living with greys

He invited me to come up to one of the why moorlands matter events run by These are held between East Carnigill, Cotherstone and Arkengarthdale. The organisations mission is to bring people together who may not otherwise meet, in the hope of greater understanding between those who wish to see the British countryside and its flora and fauna survive but who may have differing opinions resulting in 24 hours of healthy discussion and compromise. With an end hope of securing a future for the countryside, its vulnerable species and the communities that live within it.

The point of them is to give an honest visual of a managed grouse moor at a time when many rare, migratory birds are using them to nest within and then their is fairly orchestrated talking afterwards of views and feelings from those who attend and those attending are generously fed, watered and given a comfortable overnight stay between an evening and dawn safari on the moorlands.

They aim to host a cross pollinated list of invitees of those for and against shooting, those for and against rewilding, lovers of birds, lovers of foxes too, society representatives and those making policy that affect how the countryside is managed. It is a daring and admirable concept of inviting honest debate.

The latter hosting location of Arkengarthdale is where I journeyed to very early from Oxford to Darlington, meeting a fellow attendee who kindly picked me up from Darlington station. The car drove higher and higher, away from urbanisation and into an All Creatures Great and Small, Wuthering Heights, old world landscape, England at its most beautiful, once the forestry commission hillsides faded into a tapestry of heathers and babbling streams. It was a welcome place to feel like one was a tiny spec and where Wifi was largely defeated.

A grouse is a wild bird, they cannot be artificially reared easily and so their success depends on the management of the heather and the protection from the now many abundant predator creatures that eye them as prey.

Seeing red grouse for the first time, they are curiously long bodied with feathered legs. Their chicks, several broods of which pecked and crossed the roads, resembled little odd golden silkie bantam like little birds. Tightly bodied and quite adorably little fabled, creeping creatures that suddenly burst into fluttering attempts.

Apparently the broods of many birds here like to use the roads as the grass is short against the heather along them and the tarmac is often warmer which is to a chicks liking.

Up on the moors, it felt a world away from the Cotswold countryside that I have come to know and the ever busy train stations I frequent and the packed trains that I travel on, this was Wuthering Heights country, I think and it made me think of my readings of Deborah Devonshire’s writing of Grouse on shoots at Bolton Abbey, to my mind at least rich in romance and purpose. Although this part of the world is due to have its views from where I stood, invaded by wind farms. This is despite plans to reintroduce golden eagle here soon who’s wingspans are at great risk from turning turbines.

No managed landscape that concerns that of the game keeper, hill farmer or gentry has been more demonised or politicised of late than that of the moorland, especially so by the hugely well funded Protect the Wild organisation which is a PETA on steroids, well dressed and hugely emotive idealism that is only interested really in the end in the rights of foxes and crows along with the mega fauna that seems to get press attention.

If you google news articles on the subject of moors, then you may read largely, Guardian published columns referring to these lands as areas managed like chicken coops for the rich. We cannot shy away from it as yes shooting does happen here but nor should we shy away from it either as why in a nation that mostly eats meat from intensively farmed animals who endure the horrors of slaughterhouses should there be any shame in eating game. The end for beast and bird here is clean and swift, there has been a huge issue in not PR-ing the benefits of this tradition to the wider public. The anti’s have been one step ahead for a long time and much misinformation has been deeply dispersed.

Much of how a Grouse moor functions has been often deliberately confused into how a modern pheasant shoot operates and this subject requires another post to give my views to as otherwise this will all become too long winded thing for you to read.

The shooting of grouse is vital for these rural economies and the people who work here, they earn far more from, lets face it from usually fairly rich men who are willing to come and bag grouse than any supposed nature visitor centre would pay to staff. Shoots fill up the inns and local stately halls that accommodate them and in turn this employs many local people from chefs, housekeepers, beaters, drivers and also the skill of the contented working gun dogs, the angel faced cockers and polar bear like labs who fetch and carry the fallen grouse and these bagged birds. Grouse which is considered to be very much a savoured and seasonal delicacy are then sent across the country with no involvement of intensive farming.

When it comes to meat of which I am very fussy, I adore game above all meat especially venison, cleanly killed and naturally fed no meat is better, there should be a national campaign to encourage such meat eating. One of my favourite charities getting British Game into the public food chain is the Country Food Trust they provide nutritious meals to people in need using British game.

What I honestly saw on this trip undeniably, was a heather rich aviary of spring avian families and their chicks safe largely thanks to management of the land with huge skill and the need to control the predators that would otherwise devastate their numbers if left unchecked within just a few years.

One of the most notable things on the moor to see was the low height of the heather. Thanks to a mosaic of large oval sized areas being burnt or cut the heather was low and lush at a height that the birds preferred to peck, nest within and rest. The heather beetle is a worrying concern, milder winters are allowing it to kill areas of heather, if you think an affected box hedge looks bad after box moth caterpillar you need to also see the brown devastation of heather beetle. More sinister is the rise of blood sucking ticks too, a risk to both beast, man and bird. Small chicks are blood sucked to death by a bad burden of ticks.

When the heather is left to grow into a higher, twiggy state it looses its lush, low density and worse, it allows the predators - foxes, stoats, rats, mink, and weasels the cover they prefer to hide fatally within. We saw a nesting lapwing who was sitting her eggs almost on top of the low heather, her body snuggled down and perfectly camouflaged.

Worse still, the higher heather is allowed to grow unmanaged, the more there is a risk of violent moor fires, intensified of late by climate change, can become.

These unmanaged fires are fierce and kill the precious seed bank of awaiting seeds within the moorlands top peat soil meaning that reestablishment of flora does not bounce bank within a season as it does within the managed pockets of cut or burnt heather.

Our first drive out in a convoy of land rovers was met with lashings of rain and the curlews, the first I had ever seen, fluted ghost like over head, gliding with grace their grey plumage suiting the uneasy sky before landing and dwarfing in their size as their great wings closed.

We spotted a gangling, delicate Curlew chick who was all legs disappearing into the heather from the car windows. These birds, if they make to adulthood can live long lives but if they do not manage to rear their chicks with success, populations easily become aged and then they suddenly vanish from areas all together as pairs become pensioners. Of all our birds in peril, the curlew feels like a modern day version of the unicorn. They are magical and in great peril of being almost completely unsuited to cope in this modern age. Currently you can vote for curlews to appear on new bank of England notes by voting for them here .

Perhaps the prize view of the safari though should go to the view of a mother woodcock and her tiny chick already with its slender little beak stabbing and probing into the grass in the sunshine. These little birds with their big eyes are often nocturnal yet we were lucky enough to see this parent and chick at dawn. In the winter, the British woodcock population is amassed thanks to those that migrate here from Northern Europe. The resident British population however is largely considered to be in decline.

Other chicks especially those of the lapwings seemed more robust and they need to be up here. Wet and cold weather is often fatal for the young broods who call this place home. Chicks easily become wet and cold and a mother bird is only able to brood so many once. As they begin to grow, those within the larger brood pecking order of grouse or pheasant have to jostle to be cuddled under their mothers wings and breast feathers, often her body warmth and the chicks tightly bundling together is vital for them to make it to four weeks old by which time they will have started to feather up themselves.

If you really think about it then it is incredible that any have made it to hatching at all. A female partridge, grouse, pheasant, curlew, lapwing, woodcock, snipe and plover all lay their eggs vulnerably on the ground and these do not, like some Disney animation hatch within seconds.

The eggs have to be incubated around the clock for 3 to 4 weeks. My domestic hens eggs have the safety of being sat on within a broody coop or in an incubator. Out on the moor there is no such moddly coddling, just the bond between a pair of birds in the case of curlew or partridge or the remarkable determination of the single mother who is a grouse or pheasant.

Black Grouse hens who are especially rare now, are apparently easily scared from their eggs. They may not return to their sitting at all if they are unduly disturbed, walkers and dogs off leads are especially concerning to ground nesters. In other moorlands managed without extensive predator control to protect these birds, other methods such as electric fencing have proved inadequate to ensure the sustaining of a population.

As a born townie, I do not mind the tradition ways of game keeping and I absolutely hate foxes. My heroes, include Clarissa Dickson Wright who once during her appearance on BBC Question Time, slapped the table and said ‘REMEMBER A FOX IS NOT A SWEET CUDDLY ANIMAL BUT A VISCIOUS CRULE KILLER’ never a truer line spoken. Clarissa reads her autobiography Spilling the Beans on audible and it is much recommended. It has saved me from many a long and delayed train journey. You can also find the marvellous episode of two fat ladies game here.

Why this dislike of foxes and other Beatrix Potter villains might come as a shock to anyone I cannot fathom really with me being a connoisseur of chickens that I have to keep protected at great expense.

What a sadness it is to have to keep such beloves under constant lock and key due to Mr Todd being allowed to become a common and brazen sight when he should be a banished and much feared shadow rather than a celebrated Spring Watch terrorist! The latest clip shared from this programme on instagram saw foxes and badgers frolicking within oxeye daisies, a pastoral modern ignorant image of demons. And demons I consider them to as like ourselves foxes in particular are ever evolving and expanding in their populations, much of their traditional avian prey is falling fowl of this in not being able to adapt at all.

What really does turn my stomach though is the smell of KFC on the bus which I experienced yesterday. My home town of Nottingham is now infused at every turn with American based fast food chains fuelling cruelty that crosses the world from the South American soya that the suffering boiler chicks are fed, the workers in the processing plants where scenes of modern slavery have been documented, the obesity such rubbish has indulged to become the norm of the modern human form here and lastly to the litter festooned along almost every British road.

We have become a nation that is inclined to interfere with the countryside from the position of town thought and the crime in that no one sees anything dead anymore thanks largely to Bristol BBC nature filming ignorance.

One of my most hated lines that I often seen on social media comments is that ‘Its natures way’ which is used selectively to inject again and again the cuddly images of the actions of predator species whom are flourishing and are at larger numbers than the country has ever experienced to the determent of our more delicate species that are not able to adapt especially concerning the vulnerabilities of ground nesting birds. Through the histories of extinction, it has been the worlds ground nesting birds, especially those on islands who have been hardest hit by an imbalance of prey versus predation. There is an urgent lesson to learn here of how emotion in how we choose to manage nature for a fair status quo in these modern times must meet up to true field based evidence the most vulnerable and delicate of species need to survive , up on the moors of Yorkshire.

It is the first time I haven’t been for ten years in fact. I probably am rare in that I know what the score is in terms of work load for both the show gardens and also the shops. Retail is very much the elephant in the room out numbering the gardens hugely yet it’s often snubbed.

And then on press day I get what adds up to half an hour or so being treated like a famous person in being asked my views and having my photo taken which is great as they often end up on Getty images, nice, it will all feed into that longed for guardian obituary.

For the show gardens, it is, after weeks of them being put together a roll call of incredibly early morning shifts of intense watering and preening. For the shops, and Chelsea is about shopping there is no getting away from that , it’s a week of endlessly intensive stocking up of stock and stand care. You have a very short early doors window at dawn for proper stocking up access of a vehicle quite the task however and then for the rest of the day or the entire day, if your stock is of small size, your stand will often be reliant on willingly leaf cutter ant mode staff.

To be honest, in the years I have worked Chelsea like this it’s been great for my body. An 18k step foot count becomes the norm because the shop vans are all parked behind the tennis courts and I was working a shop which stands design had not allowed for a stock room, understandably.

To be honest I loved it also because people kept making a point of how strange is was to see Arthur Parkinson off instagram and a podcast working so it was quite nice to be flitting in and out the stand like some sort of delivering frantic humming bird, dropping off weighty bags for life carryings of seed, vases and other things that my mum describes as -

‘All very beautiful but useless in the event of a war’ Little wonder I have to fight myself from such pessimistic thought, a La La land attitude is a far easier place to be and to be with. I’ll be back next year, I have to say I did with the above mind set rather miss it.

After the usual vulgarity of the Met Gala, It was a tonic to be reminded that fashion can be a beautiful thing and serve as an adorning ode to nature as was to be seen thanks to the wondrous Cate Blanchett who wore a dress that I have thought of every day since seeing her in it at this years Cannes film festival. It’s a dress that I would want my garden to be and certainly if I did a Chelsea show garden it would, I hope look like this.

It was created by British designer Sarah Burton of Givenchy who took a still life painting of rich florals by the Philippine artist Olan Ventura

Olan, who has been an artist for more than two decades, acknowledged in an interview with preview that having his work blossom into “something interactive and more tangible” allowed it to communicate with a new audience hailing from a different industry, creating space for the artful worlds of fashion and painting to exist in a dialogue.

The Embroidered florals included those of annual opium and perennial oriental poppies that took an especially central stage on the dress. They are a May cottage garden stalwart that I rarely see used to full flamingo parade flock effect within the Chelsea show gardens.

The wonder of Dutch still life arrangement paintings is that they embellish together flowers from different seasons as they would have taken so long to paint, Olan has continued this jumble of seasons into his modern recreations. And so the finished artistry is something of gardens pickings from a number of months cemented together in oils.

The dress included the most yellow golden daffodils, Georgian burst pink cupped old fashioned roses very much resembling the excellent rose ‘Duchess of Cornwall’ and other flowers that at guess I imagine could have been varieties perhaps of hellebores and primulas, all in more dowdy hen pheasant browns and buffs that made those of the primary reds, oranges and yellows sing.

It was the most beautiful thing I have seen in a long time worn indeed by a beautiful person. As I write this, it’s the hottest May to have occurred within my lifetime. I have picked all the peonies rather than see them be burned by such fierce summer sun. The traditional cottage garden, the bluebell woods of old they are not designed to cope with this shift of weather. Cate’s dress is a highlight of the beloved cottage garden favourites who may frazzle under the earths new intensive sun but perhaps opium poppies will thrive. Oriental poppies I have always loved, they have fleshy roots that go quite deep and therefore in terms of their drought resistance they are probably going to be ok like the opium poppies. I love to pick all poppies and if you sear the stem ends in 5 seconds into boiling water then straight into cold they do last as a cut flower for the weekend. But it’s their effortless taffeta petals alive with the buzz of a visiting bumble bee as if it is rolling in the coal of the black pollen that I love to witness the most when it comes to these flamboyant characters. I wouldn’t grow an oriental poppy in a pot because they just don’t give enough year round presence. Once flowering is finished the foliage goes to a tatty brown mess, cut it back and it will re sprout but far better for them to in the ground, they do well in fact being planted with managed areas of grass that is allowed to become a spring and summer meadow.

Blanchett is a hero of mine since I watched her in my childhood cinema visits of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here she opens the first film, The Fellowship with what is now a very climate change and mad men in charge worthy reading of -

"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it."

Galadriel was the lady of the wood, an elf queen who’s forest of Lothlórien home was under the gaze of distant shadow and evil that was poised to consume and dominate all free and good like of Tolkien’s middle earth.

I briefly mentioned my adoration of her in this role to Cate in person when I said hello to her at last year’s Chelsea Flower Show. Her reply was a fabulous ‘I’m just like her’ with a smile. It was a very starstruck moment for me.

Today, Cate in her mortal Australian yet still goddess presence, has found sanctuary and the peace of feeling that she is back in her native Australia by visiting the arboretums cultivated at Wakehurst place, now local to her Sussex home, this is the more country estate sized cousin of the Royal botantical gardens at Kew. Here they look after several glades of towering eucalyptus and 8 meter tall Wollemi pines within its Coates Wood arboretum.

She speaks very movingly about this to Martha Kearney in This Natural Life .

With the very real threat of a super El Niño developing, Australias forests may once again suffer the extreme and devastating bushfires that we saw back in 2019. Then the fires burned over 17 million hectares, including 210,606 ha of land on Kangaroo Island and 90,000 ha of the national park in South Australia.

Such events are making seed banks and collections of plants more vital than ever before as we face a hostile future for life and beauty on Earth. They are our real time Noah’s arks.

In 2024 Cate became an Ambassador to Wakehurst, presenting its own podcast unearthed. This celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst.

She is also became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency in 2016. Speaking in April of 2025 Cate she said at the Prince of Wales Earthshot prize -

“overwhelming nature of the climate challenge can lead to despair, but we don’t have time for apathy and inaction”.

Noting that it is “really important to recognise that many people are struggling” themselves, she told The Telegraph: “Climate can feel like yet another burden to take on – that no one individual can make the changes needed to turn things around.”

”But,” she added, “(and it’s a big but!) collectively, we do have power.

”Small actions do add up. The way we consume does add up.”

In that I take much hope . cheers Cate .

Their petals flutter in the wind that is flowing through the open doors that lead between the cafe courtyard and plant nursery.

If it had been a calm day, then no doubt the rhododendron handkerchiefs would have been filling the open ended corridor with a perfume of the gods.

There is an art to refined rather than too commercialised retail. A balance of enough and often less is more, creating a feeling of soul while maintaining the Ruth Watson Country House rescue mantra of visitor ‘sheep deep factor’.

Deborah Devonshire’s brain child of gift and farm shop launched at Chatsworth in the 80’s. The youngest of the six Mitford sisters, Deborah’s childhood commercial venture of hen keeping saw her mother pay for the hen feed while buying back the eggs from her daughter to sell. On the success of the chatsworth shops the duchess would later advise the then Prince Charles on his retail offer at Highgrove. The Chatsworth estate farm shop gave inspiration to Daylesford and other blueprints of such retail ventures. Every visitor attraction has got to have both a gift shop and coffee and cake offer today.

The only exception that comes to mind in refusing to become so is Rousham Gardens in Oxfordshire whose only offer remains that of what Chatsworth once had originally. A little table for ticket sales, a rack of postcards and loos, albeit loos that are always dressed with flowers cut from the garden.

It is the cake and coffee draw however especially that sees many places large and small manage to eke out an existence still today. The British march or rather (let’s face it, the majority drive) to places often on the lure offer of what has become a normalised the grandeur of what is a feel good treat of tea and cake within garden and stately home cafes.

If you happen to visit the prestigious Burford Garden Company at dawn for opening time at 9am then you’ll notice ladies in their large landrovers, usually in their sunglasses awaiting for the doors to open. Most will head straight to the cafe for morning coffee.

It is all a charmingly refreshing and alas rare Beatrix Potter sort of Ginger and Pickles vibe, that the feeling of the little potting shed shop at Coton Manor in Northamptonshire has. You can see the little postcard sized stockroom like pigeon holes for the shops postcards near to the little table used for ticket sales where heavy little stone ducks are used as paperweights.

This is by no means put to be patronising as Coton does mean business when it comes to visitor numbers. It was named a winner of The English Garden's The Nation's Favourite Gardens 2019. The garden is headed by the very much hands on owner Susie Pasley-Tyler who together with her Husband Ian with help from daughter Imogen give the feeling of the place being still family owned and hugely loved.

Last weekend, Coton saw over a thousand visitors descend on the adored gardens. The grounds are complete with deeply diverse herbaceous borders shadowed by yew hedges, hosta banked, ornamental duck slug patrolled rills leading to many pools fed I presume from the formal lake, long horn cattle grazed meadows (the lasagna served at lunch is from their own herds beef) alongside croquet worthy flamingo frequented lawns, a terrace of pots. And then the Manor House itself whose facade currently sports its wisteria in full bridgeton worthy bloom and also again at the time of writing, a just on the turn of fading native bluebell wood.

There is also a well stocked nursery of home grown plants from cuttings and seeds which makes me envious of more local visitors who no doubt don’t bother to grow their own sweet peas when Coton can do such tasks for them and safely away from any mice.

The garden’s most striking feature aside from Susie’s flowers are its flamingos. The originals hailed from a friendship of the Wildfowl and Wetlands trust Sir Peter Scott. From a distance, they are often mistaken as sculptures until they move. During opening hours the flock retires to slumber one legged in the water but before and after they flamboyantly parade through the garden at large.

I offered my flamingo illustrations for Susie and Imogen to explore possibly adding a range of Coton giftwares and so we now have a mug featuring two Greater flamingos and the tulips Estella Rijnveld of complementary cerise red and white. These sit in the shop now alongside a very camp tea-towel of a Coral Caribbean flamingo, like me it looks very proud of them being in the place! Another excuse to visit and pick one up if you are in Northamptonshire.

Coton Manor is open Tuesday to Saturday 12pm until 5pm, until the 26th September. Coton Manor Website

Coton Manor, Coton, Northants, NN6 8RQ

I’ll be doing a dahlia day here which will include lunch on Tuesday the 15th September

You can read more about the garden at Coton and how Susie gardens here in her excellent full colour photographed book Gardening with Colour at Coton Manor

I bought them because frozen raspberries are a better choice at this time of year than the fresh ones. They were British frozen raspberries. These are picked and quickly frozen within hours of stem to packet, it’s a clever thing.

Admittedly, the defrost resembles a mashed, scarlet messed up affair. They aren’t going to defrost looking pert and freshly picked.

For the purpose of their intended use though, which would have been the added filling to a Victoria sponge birthday cake, they are a cut price and sensible more earth friendly option.

We known that frozen peas often are fresher when bought frozen than those that are fresh by the time they get to the supermarkets. The same can be considered for raspberries and all soft fruit when they aren’t in season.

With soft fruit, aside from months that they are in season, which my childhood like mind knows is at the earliest when it comes to raspberries come mid July, we have many months to go until true and fresh British raspberries hit the shelves.

At the moment, I won’t buy them fresh and never strawberries. The latter are the devils work to see them now. Nothing makes me more disparaging of the modern man than seeing such summer born things being advertised on a supermarket telly advert over Christmas.

Needless , tasteless, stupid! I did see a nice man in Burford high street last week who sells fruit and veg with his stall looking marvellous and I bought asparagus from him which is in season now in late April. He also did have punnets of what I will confess looked like beautiful British strawberries. I wished I’d have asked them about them being available so early and how probably in Lincolnshire I am guessing they grow them for such early harvesting. Hydroponics and lighting I am guessing but how do they get the bees in to pollinate the strawberry blossom so early, many child like questions!

I was bought up knowing my Nannar Mins raspberry bed. It was full of encroaching ground elder. She had the knowledge of knowing which of the older stems to cut down each year to ensure a decent picking from the up and coming younger fronds along with the defensive and often poorly equipped recycled bits of netting dangled across the lot on bamboo canes, to try and save the emerging little specs of red fruit just glistening from a fascinator of hiding leaves, from blackbirds prying eyes. One of our last times in her garden together was harvesting red currants.

You need a decent bit of garden or allotment to give over to raspberries really but they are reliable and self reliant once established on the whole.

The would still be present in an abandoned garden for several years but they appreciate lots of manure each spring in an ideal word.

A raspberry, picked on a late summer day, warm in the hand is an absolute knock out flavoursome bomb of tart sweetness. You need a decent committee of raspberry canes to give you enough fruit to fill a bowl with as if just picked into the hand you would have to be a saint to deliver such a picking back to the kitchen rather than scoffing them.

Those that are on the fresh supermarket shelves when they aren’t in season, have come from far flung places such as Morrocco or Argentina. And here they will have been sprayed with a cocktail of chemicals not to mention the air miles and often unsustainable ways of watering them in these often water stressed countries and the modern slave labour such production for supermarket price tags entails. You can tell I was bought up in a household where the guardian newspaper was to be at hand most weekends. Supermarket supply chain investigations I am glad to put helped me to read as an 8 year old, I was late to the party.

From the chiller, raspberries usually lack flavour and they’ll be of a variety that is able to bounce and hold its shape during a long import process. They aren’t worth the money and cannot surely hold the assumed goodness of vitamins that an inseason garden or organic farm shop sort of one can hold.

I like being aware of seasonality, it’s important and ensures an appreciation of things especially of taste and scent.

I don’t like to see roses or raspberries alike until they are in season. Snobby some would call it if so then good!

And so that’s why I bought the frozen raspberries to defrost for a cake, a dam sight cheaper than the fresh, tasteless flown in late April alternative.

But someone has taken them away. Buggar. The question is should I be annoyed. Could they have they been thrown away or would they just perhaps have been used for something, hmmmm is defrosting frozen raspberries a likely hood for the accused?

Well actually I have no right to hold such a trial because it’s not my freezer.

However I do still defrost it. This involves tilting the tower like object out from its tight built in concave and then with the help of an angled broomstick, switching it off from behind whilst balancing it at a tilt. Quite a household feat.

Possibly, I’d bring it up but I can’t be bothered. The cake shall not be any the wiser with just raspberry jam and cream.

The cake has taken 6 eggs from the hens. Large sky blue ones laid by my own luckiest Old Cotswold Legbars surely! I weighed them all in together at 375 grams. I think grams so that meant the flour, sugar and stork marge was of the same weight. Though I put it as shouldn’t, stork marge is the thing for a good cake.

The rules? Good eggs, these and the stork or whatever butter you use at room temperature and the whole thing is beaten by hand always and always with a wooden spoon, all very Helen Mirren cake competition speech really.

Have a good Sunday. Best Arthur

Their prowess is to be heard across celebrity packed podcasts. Claudia Winkleman declared to Kathy Burke that a Burford Brown omelette with mild cheddar would be her last supper whilst Sarah Jessica Parker confided to Ruthie Rogers of her fantasy of smuggling these exclusively British laid eggs back to America.

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‘Don’t think I’m a dick but I don’t like expensive, crisps or chocolate or ice cream but I do like an expensive egg, yes. Thank you. I like a Burford Brown. OOOOH! When the yolk is bright yellow.' Claudia Winkleman with Kathy Burke on Where there's a will there's a wake

My well preened assembly of Burford Browns bossily plod about before running with urgency at the sound of me opening the metal feed bin. Their jet-black, austere bodies are narrated with a constantly burbling bravado of commanding clucks. I long to see them on the grass verges of their native namesake land that is of course Burford village high street, perhaps in a future Cotswold drama.

Each hen has a large, rosy comb and variable neckerchiefs of strikingly burnished orange feathers, known as hackles. Are they my favourite chickens? They would be I think in the top 6, I do like a few layers amongst the fancies and they are beautiful and very chic in their feathers, simple pretty black dressed hens but with a shimmer of plumage that if they were indeed in dresses they would be without doubt some designer labelled number we are not talking bonmarche high-street here.

Like clockwork, within days of the nights lengthening into spring, they naturally lay respectfully until the autumn nights draw in once more, about 3 eggs per hen per week they would be more bountiful if they were younger, all hens lay at their best in their first and second year, my girls are now reaching their 4th season. Then a productive reprieve of them for once being too posh to push has been very well earned.

Some curiosity has been made of late regarding the differing colour tones of egg yolks. Grass organically contains the yellow pigment of xanthophylls and supremely adds to an eggs flavour too. Other natural dietary additions such as paprika, chopped maize and calendula petals along mashes of boiled carrots, sweet potato and squash can all induce an orange yolks complexion due to the hens absorbing these carotenoid rich offerings. Paprika is the key to shop bought eggs today having yolks that almost rival that of blood oranges, my own are a good utterly butterly yellow thanks to grass and soya free smallholder layers meal.

For essentially hard eggshells, hens always need a good grit of oystershell that is rich in calcium. If I have a lot of egg shells from baking I save them and put them on a baking tray in the oven for 15 mins at a high heat. Then they are crushed and also added back to the grit hopper. It amazes me how much grit my hens get through, they are fed an expensive one for racing pigeons - versele Laga grit

Burford Browns are active hens who need space, their thick feathers act like black mackintoshes equipping them to free range with gusto. If they become bored, usually due to a lack of space and fresh grass to peck at then feather pecking can become a real vice. It takes a great deal of effort to rear healthy and laying hens. When considering the time they take to look after and the investment of fox proof deer like fencing around their pent house like hen houses then an honesty box price command for their precious eggs would have to surely work out at a fiver for a half dozen.

My dad on receiving a pair as an oddly generous present from me, returned them within the month, declaring that it was as if I had released two rotavators into the garden, I had them back without complaint. Admittedly, they are a robust breed suited to gardens made up of either toughly stemmed roses and gooseberry bushes. Large fruit cages make for very good hen runs that provide a decent amount of room for fox protective strutting or they are most at home free ranging within farmyards.

Their original home was that of Manor farm on Westhall Hill just up the road from Burford’s main street.

Back in the humbler years of the 1900’s, Mable Pearman began breeding her hens here who laid noticeably darker than average brown eggs.

Years later her grandson, Philip Lee- Woolf would come to notice these eggs, remembering them as being delicious from his childhood and in 1980 he began to rear them himself.

Philip never thought to ask his grandmother though what the exact lineage was of her poultry pedigree. It is a closely guarded secret, and it is only Philip who rears genuine Burford Brown hens for domestic sales.

He knows more about hens than anyone I have met and within moments of talking to him, you sense the deep love he still has for them. If you have your heart set on having some, then you have to be on his Legbars of Broadway here for his seasonal debutante pullets.

Traditional breeds that were and are known for laying brown eggs are Dutch Welsummers and also French Marans but their eggs can be at times unpredictable.

Some Maran hens after a few weeks of laying, begin to lay eggs that are of a faded complexion. They start off as dark chocolate but then fade to a pancake batter brown; it is almost as if they are feathered printers running out of ink! When dark brown eggs first began being seen, they were occasionally accused of being painted because their colour, with scrubbing can be removed from the shell. Pigments unique to specific breeds of hens are applied to the outer surface of an eggshell, shortly before they are laid.

An internal shell gland deposits a natural brown pigment known as porphyrins at an almost uniquely high, genetic Burford Brown concentration onto the eggshell. Philip spent years perfecting his flocks to ensure hardy and uniformed genetic traits before taking his eggs public.

Talking to Philip today, he describes how he found the British egg market in the 80’s and early 90’s ‘It was a shock to see the lack foresight and imagination. The industry was stuck in a rut and dominated by a handful of large packers’ intent on making profits at the expense of poultry welfare and in many cases, the producer farmers too. Quality and individuality didn’t seem to matter and chickens themselves, even less. It was all about uniformity, numbers and price – small, medium or large eggs of pale shells and a watery texture, in a drab grey pulp box.’

And so, Philip sought out high-end food halls to frequent his eggs in first. The resplendent, free-range eggs within their colourful egg boxes carried an unrivalled flavour and quality.

Honest but genius marketing such as the hens being live streamed into the Harrods food hall and headlines of the hens being played classical music to, courted customers organically from the outset. They also went into ethical quail egg production as at that time most laying quails were being packed into tiny battery cages. Philip began rearing his quail as ‘Free to Fly’ in large barns and at one time he was exporting his quail eggs to Japan by the thousand, in jars pickled as a delicacy in a variety of flavours such as Smoked Tarragon and Worcestershire sauce. An hilarious visit from Rustie Lee with Janet Lee-Woolf concerning the cooking of Quails eggs can be viewed here .

Early on, Philip’s traditional approach of hen rearing which often allowed cockerels to range with the laying hens sparked a headline due to 9 year old school boy Miles Orford, of Great Ashfield hatching a chick named Celia from a Legbars of Broadway egg bought in his local supermarket back in May of 2007.

But with success came the realities of hard commercialism as supplying supermarkets demanded more and more of a larger business model. Philip and his wife Janet, decided to part with their respected brand that had become Clarence Court, in 2004, knowing that their ethos of having relaxed and properly free-range hens had left an impression both on the egg industry and crucially with consumer conscience.

Today, in a similar fashion to how Philip once farmed, Cacklebean eggs in Gloucestershire is run by Steph and Paddy Bourns whose unrivalled and truly ethical eggs, bought in beautiful square boxes, can now be found in Fortum and Mason and many independent grocers.

Paddy, who like Philip is a life long poultry man, hatches out his own chicks in large clothe chest sized incubators from eggs laid by his oldest hens on the farm. Once the hens reach a retirement age of no longer being considered commercial in their laying figures they are not sent off to a processing plant for dog food in the dead of night but instead they find themselves in the rehoming hands of Fresh Start for Hens, its all a very much idyllic but very real Wallace and Gromit Chicken Run like family farm enterprise.

In contrast to Cacklebeans truly on the farm accolades, Stonegate eggs whom own the Clarence Court brand seem somewhat more secretive regarding their production. You won’t find much to give reassurances of high welfare other than styled photos of eggs and recipes on their social media pages whilst words of luxury and free range are abound.

Digging on Google reveals various things. Bought Burford Brown eggs are big business which is not surprising given that all the major supermarkets now stock them with the most recent scandal involving shoplifters reboxing these higher end eggs into cheaper boxes at the checkout. For what purpose this gives leaves me baffled because isn’t it the statement of that terracotta egg box on ones kitchen table that matters but perhaps the fashion now is to have ones eggs in a bowl on show and unboxed as if you have freshly collected them yourself?

The commercial flock that Stonegate rears stands at some 4 million hens at anyone time. They rear their own pullets from incubation, resulting in them producing 1 billion British laid eggs a year with them being laid on around190 different farms, quite the commercial enterprise and an important one in national food security.

Their policies on issues such as a debeaking, where the day old chicks have the tips of their beaks cut to deter feather pecking seem unclear and no Clarence Court Burford Browns are allowed to be adopted at the end of their commercial laying cycle but I do hope the odd few meet a liberation now and then. With avian flu lock downs now being a yearly fear and burden for months on end where no hens are allowed out of doors one wonders if a new terminology for high welfare will have to be termed as aviary laid where the hens could be given sweeping areas of covered verandas?

The RSPCA’s Freedom Food Assurance scheme attempted to advocate for both verandas and a requirement of all barn and free range British laying hens being given natural daylight but it was largely shot down by the egg industry

Bar one vegan led investigation of which always need to be viewed with a pinch of salt due to their farming bias Clarence Court have faired better than rival egg boxes such as the Happy Egg company whose reputation has been smashed time and time again due to such investigations involving abhorrent seas of half bald hens crammed into warehouses.

The royal flock at Highgrove today is largely made up of Burford Browns, speckled Cuckoo Marans and Welsummers. There is rather exclusively, a Burford cockerel too who cuts a fine mahogany bodied figure with his swashbuckling tail feathers waving over the hen’s heads. As soon as the hazel stick gate is opened, he leads his harem excitedly out to the fresh grass beyond.

They all return at dusk to a roost that is cladded of green oak tiles, known as ‘Cluckingham Palace’. Visually, it looks more like a fairy tale cottage than a typical hen house.

The Marans to have known this impressive chicken run have seen wins at poultry shows, not due to their physical appearances but thanks to their eggs. There is an array of pinned up rosettes and show cards that the flocks shelled efforts have won over the years. His Majesty is Patron to the Poultry Club of Great Britain.

Egg showing has of late been on the rise when it comes to attempts of continuing the passions of poultry showing in the wake of bird flu, where legislation has, to the peril of many rare breed numbers, seen shows devoid of any live birds to judge. Restrictions on Free range poultry keeping lifted on the 9th of April last week but the damage to the fancy after several years of constant lock downs and quite odd civil servant legalisation regarding the movements and showing of poultry has done real damage to the numbers of rare and pure breed poultry now being bred in domestic hands. Some attention has turned as a result to the perfection of the permitted egg classes. A clutch has to be freshly laid, be identical in size and be of its correct breed colour. Unsurprisingly, competition when it comes to the showing of dark brown eggs has always been especially high. It is a delight to see a show of eggs all nestled into their round trays of white sand and to see which has been awarded a rosette.

Deborah Devonshire, adored eggs from her self-described enigmatic Burford Browns and shy Welsummers that she kept at Chatsworth and later at the Old Vicarage in nearby Edensor in Derbyshire. In her autobiography she recalls her poultry keeping pedigree made hugely notable thanks to keeping them at large within both the garden, farmyard and free range amongst the parked visitor cars at Chatsworth House. Burford Browns, Welsummers, Light Sussex, hybrid brown Warrens and White Leghorns all very good, smooth legged layers superseded her more too posh to push Buff Cochins that were famous for joining in on visitors picnics.

The Old Vic eggs, labelled as those from ‘The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire’ were once taken up the road to her beloved Farm shop and piled here into a bowl like a mound of delicate Ferrero Rochers with empty egg boxes that tempted customers to fill them. Unsurprisingly, they sold out within the day.

Speaking in 2010 to Jenni Murray on BBC Woman’s Hour in admiration of the hens’ efforts, they both delight in conversation with ‘Are they laying? isn’t it thrilling? Yes, they are laying and they are the most delicious eggs I have ever had. Oh they are incredible’. listen here

Famous last words for these most beautiful and bountiful hens.

Thyme Exhibition

Tell us about your background and what drew you to exhibit your hens at Thyme? 

I grew up in Nottingham in a town called Hucknall, where all my immediate family lived too.

Back then it was a greenbelt town, so it was a lovely childhood of walking. A lot from the town into the neighbouring villages of Papplewick and Linby and then summer holidays we spent in the Derbyshire Dales, on a farm not too far from Matlock. I did draw a lot when I was little but then I stopped and sort of started again during lockdown largely focusing on chickens I tend to draw them and flamingos and pelicans with some botanicals, the odd parrot tulip increasingly. I write, my first book concerned a garden I tended to at the Emma Bridgewater Factory in Stoke on Trent then came the Flower Yard books and now chickens, Chicken boy and The Hen Party. I go to various places with a bucket of home-grown flowers to do flower arranging demonstrations and talks, I also have done Create Academy Garden courses online and the rest of the time I’m rabbling about the aforementioned and various other madness and viewpoints on Instagram. And of course, I garden, grow flowers and keep hens. To say I don’t drive I journey across the country at great length of late!

 I met Caryn Hibbert, Thyme’s owner a few years ago now and we have a mutual love of birds and conservation, so we’ve kept in touch. The water meadows at thyme are rich in birds and I love Caryn’s paintings they are incredible.  I love to stop on my bike and look at the river Leach, it’s such a beautiful, river crystal clear and you see the brown trout. That bit of Thyme as you go into the Southrop village and the river bends and goes into a floodplain like bit of field with Willows, when the daffodils are out its so beautiful. This scene makes you glad to be in England after enduring the winter, it’s very grey in this part of the world it seems during the winter, and I don’t go away for it!

 Seeing the trout in the river Leach, reminds me of how we used to spot them in Hucknall’s Baker Street brook when me and my brother were little.  This river still runs through Hucknall town but alas these days the trout here are seldom to be found due to pollution. Thyme and the villages around it that I’ve come to know, especially as I cycle through them truly are beautiful. I just don’t do very well with the social side of things that they entail, it’s very London in the countryside socially. I moved to this part of the world having had a relationship with my best friend, the Interior designer James Mackie and I remember one of the first pubs we went to was the Swan and it was head to toe on its outside dressed in warm white fairy light through the Virginia creeper, so classy!

I’ve given Caryn some of my Buff Cochin hens that sometimes wonder up from the private yard they call home at Thyme to say hello to visitors occasionally, which is lovely. I think big courtyard environments lend themselves to the softening and movement that hens give them. I felt that the Tithe barn, would be a nice space to show my chicken drawings in. It has got good natural light and is beautifully quiet when I have visited in the week so I think lends itself really nicely to being a gallery, but not like one of those in London that you dare not step into, the fact it’s a barn makes you feel you can go in with your wellies on albeit ones that have been foot wiped first!

 Whether my little drawings can have enough presence within such a big space, we’ll see! I love that Thyme is a place that truly tries to be self-sufficient, growing a lot of the kitchen garden produce to be used in its restaurant from the garden and using local suppliers and local farmers.  The eggs used at Thyme are laid by Steph and Paddy’s Cacklebean hens up the road, they are the finest eggs you could buy if you don’t keep your own hens or when hens at home are having a rest from laying.

2. How would you describe your love of chickens?

They certainly, probably are, one of the biggest lifelong parts of my life. I’ve kept them since I was 7 and wanted to keep them from the age of about 2 so I don’t think I’ll wake up anytime soon and think oh I’m going to give up keeping hens.

 I think it would be fair to describe us as a bizarre co-dependence little world, I’m sure some therapists would say it is unhealthy. I’m quite reclusive and I miss my childhood increasingly as I get older so it’s nice to have quiet with my hens and clean them out talking to myself and them especially if my phones ran out of battery or been left in a coat pocket that can be lovely, fresh sweet straw and the hens looking all lovely and perky. That sadly is not always the scene of hen keeping. You have a lot of muck, you have to keep hens very clean, you are battling so many things that want to kill and harm your birds, mites, foxes, rats! It is a lot of management to rear really lovely, healthy, steady chickens and a lot of understanding. Reading behaviours and noticing signs if something is not right. I love an old toothbrush; they are great for scrubbing the gulleys of drinkers. I’m very passionate about breed conservation of the old, traditional breeds because they are so healthy and hardy and also, I think more intelligent than the commercial hybrid birds. I keep my hens on some rented land and it’s a little town of hen houses all on legs to help keep my pyjama trousered Buff Cochin hens out of the winter wet and mud.

These chickens originally came to me from Chatsworth and are what Duchess Deborah Devonshire had at large free ranging in gardens, grandly and gently. They would join us for pecking at our picnic when we visited! Today the eggs laid from them I take back to the farmyard at Chatsworth as we try and hatch as many chicks as we can each year of these rare hens. I take the eggs, once a month from spring into summer by bus to Swindon usually and then onto a train to Chesterfield then another bus to Chatsworth from here, it sounds a lot of effort but I usually am at Chatsworth for 1pm on a good day and then from here I go and see my mum and grandmar in Nottingham for a few days. James collects the eggs for me if I am away for a few days and feeds the hens which is a great help.

It is so important to collect the freshly laid eggs every day, otherwise you get too many broody hens who want to sit on the eggs! I also keep quite bossy Burford Browns for their beautiful conker, chocolate, coloured large eggs. Elegant, tall legged, feather tiara wearing Legbars who lay sky blue eggs then I have a little Partridge Wyandotte bantam who makes the best foster hen of all when it comes to rearing chicks of the other breeds.

3. Which materials and techniques are you working with?

I’m drawing onto cold pressed watercolour card of 300 g/m2 sheets and I use my favourite, very finely tipped pens that are of the Micron pigma range. Then for colouring, I use Arteza water brush fine tip-coloured pens. These I can dip very lightly into water to give some impression of watering colour, and they blend well together too.

The chickens start with their eye like dot and their faces first and this really dictates if I then carry on with the rest of the birds body because the face, the lines although its simple and very small,  for me I really am trying to capture the feeling of the hen or the cockerels mood and animation without I hope creating them in too much of a cartoon like form. So if I feel these lines are not giving me what I need to feel, I’ll start again at this point.

Luckily because I draw them small, I can make several attempts at a bird on the same piece of card.  I collect photos of hens, I screen shot photos of them most days for references. I probably love the work of Beatrix Potter the most but I’m too lazy to work with real watercolour paint.

For the exhibition, I found a very talented seller on eBay selling handmade frames of the perfect sizes for my drawings but a lot of them I had to bid for as he sells them on eBay so getting the numbers of them took a bit of time and they arrived in the post in batches.

For the framing I did it myself, backing the drawings with quite bold red card. I think the cockerels especially are set off well by this rich colour while other hens are backed by this lovely sandy, straw farmyard feeling given by

4. What was it like bringing your book 'Hen Party' to life?

In terms of the book, it was the nicest time I’ve had creating one as my editor Sam was very understanding and together with Olga who was a brilliant book designer we laid out the book together and I think it’s a beautiful little book, charming and the size of it really suited the drawings being small in themselves. It feels odd celebrating a creature however that is so abused through intensive farming and a society that is distant from food production so I feel books are important. still I hope, especially for children that show farm animals either photographically or through art. So, the hen party book is a lovely visual thing to look through but also to read lightly to help people maybe choose what breed of hen they might keep and have as part of their lives. It is also nice to have books to dream about such things especially if you live in a city or have a country garden plagued by foxes or badgers that mean you cannot easily have any hens.

5. Which chicken are you most proud of?

Well of all the drawings that have been framed for this have got some spirit about them in my eyes. The smaller, more detailed ones probably are my favourites. There is a blue-red laced Wyandotte bantam hen who’s very sweet and composed. And a barbu d’uccle millefleur cock who’s really got a great sturt and energy with little beady eye looking at you. Some of the white, creamy hens where they depend on their outline only I like, the white silkie hens and the Light Sussex. They look wonderful all together. I hope people enjoy viewing them and seeing all the different breeds as if it is a framed poultry show to find their favourite breeds.

It’s only April and so it should be arguably as it is, cold. Cold but not too bitter. Indeed my great Grandmar who I never met is quoted by my Grandmar who is still alive and asleep as I type this, in saying the it won’t be warm until all those daffodils have died! She was probably, even with climate change right.

I am getting to a mental age where the carefree childhood memories that you remember you hold onto dearly. I remember Easter being largely of a jumper cladded egg hunt affair.

Out in the fields of meadow that surround where I keep my hens, the cowslips are flowering and are glad of the rain that we had in the week. As a result their flower stems can grow tall.

If April proves to be a dry month, then their little dancing lemon candelabras will be short and not as dramatic. The meadows here are vast thanks to the farm being Organic, there are several acres of old well stocked meadow so I picked a jam jars worth. They actually have the most subtle and beautiful perfume.

I did my first flower arranging demonstration this week. For this, I picked these along with road side dead nettle which was beautifully transformed into something very vase worthy by stripping its leaves off.

Garden wise, the bulbs planted last year both in the dahlia bed I have within the land that the hens range on and in the raised beds of a neighbours garden are coming up well. Hyacinths Woodstock, Gypsy Queen, City of Harlem are all perfume factory’s albeit stupidly dumpy ones. I haven’t sown any seeds bar those of more sweet peas. The autumn sown sweet peas though are now big and I have planted them out gathering birch and hazel for them to climb up. Sweet peas need as much organic matter as you can dig into where they are to grow, chicken manure, liquid seedweed and fermented brews of toxic smelling comfrey are what they need to grow well. With hotter summers, they are also happier and grow better in parts of the garden that give them some afternoon shade.

Due to the cold, waiting for a broody hen has been an anticipation.

Purring and sitting tight on fake dummy eggs in a trance like state of self- neglect and raging hormones, one of the lowest ranking hens of the flocks pecking order has chosen to indeed go broody at last.

The broody hen has been moved to her private hen house suite rather than left to be amongst her trampling sister Cochin hens back in the main hen house.

Here she would be pecked at and seen as an annoyance by those hens who want to lay in the same nesting box. Cochins are docile and silly hens in a nice way so this hen was easily moved to her new abode without any fuss. Other breeds can object to being moved to a nest that is not of their choosing. My best advice is to move a broody hen in the dark of night so that she then wakes up in her new broody coop unfazed.

So far egg fertility has been dismal from the Cochins. Who knows how many chicks will hopefully be on the cards for the end of April and already writing the end of April is a dreadful thing when you consider the time needed to rear the little chicks well to adulthood before autumn!

The welfare of broody hens has to be well prioritised. Each day, a sitting hen is taken off her nest for a break. Much fuss is made of this interference of human hands but these luncheons help to keep her weight up. Left to her own devices, a hen might sit tight for several days despite developing eggs being happily cooled down for an hour without the embryos being at all affected. A hen left to sit and become thin and pale faced is not good, she needs to be in her prime so she can face single parenting with good energy levels. Her nest and tummy feathers need to be well powdered against as a guard from any mites and a dusting bath of dry soil needs to be supplied so that she stays in fine feather.

It is incredible to witness a sitting hens huge dropping of guano, a great steaming pat of brown and white dolloped down as soon as her legs begin to walk after she is lifted off her nest, signalling that a toilet break can be permitted.

One thing a sitting hen does not do is lay anymore eggs, her energy is used up to allow her to sit rather than lay. As far as she’s concerned whether they have been collected or not she has already laid clutch worthy numbers!

Tomorrow, Monday I will be taking some eggs to Chatsworth Farmyard for them to hopefully hatch they will be of both Cochin and Lemon Sablepoot millefleur bantams in haste but I am looking forward to seeing the Jacob sheep lambs . I’ll report from the orangery shop ! Best Arthur x

Are there any understated plants that you think make everything else look better? Yes I think the lady’s mantel, Alchemilla Mollis is the most wonderous foliage and a delight to find self sown within the cracks of paving on terraces and the like. I love it as a picked foliage for the acid green frills so much better and not at all toxic unlike the euphorbias who I avoid at all costs! Queen Camilla loves Alchemilla Mollis too she told me last year at the garden museum so a Queen of good taste! 

• Are there any plants that you grow as much for seed heads/foliage/texture rather than their actual flowers?

• Yes I grow pancium sparkling fountain for its wild bird feeder mass of shimmering seeds and it’s lovely in the vase too. Amaranthus is a fun muppet like creature also and all the millets. I post my brothers budgies envelopes full of panicum grass seed heads and they love it, pegged up in their cage as a special treat. 

• Do you grow with cutting in mind or is that a happy by product of what you love to have in the garden?

• Increasingly both, growing annual flowers especially knowing that you must pick them to encourage the show to continue. 

• Is there a flower that you think every garden should find room for (regardless of size)? 

• Any advice you would give someone who feels overwhelmed choosing what to grow?

• Imagine you have to pack 5 packets for a desert island or imagine all of the flowers you are choosing being picked into your hand and how they will then compliment one another. 

• Which flowers do you turn to for structure in the garden? (we're thinking of spikes for this!) I love fennel and dill because it complements spring bulbs with ostrich feather like fluffy leaves then it gets taller into the summer for flowering  and I also love artichokes and cardoons for the same reason. I love the Corsican hellebore for spring so exotic surprisingly like a mini palm tree on a stem with those lime bumble bee beloved flowers. 

• What are you go to plants for filling gaps and softening shapes?

•  I love alpine strawberries they self seed all over, very pretty to edge a flower bed with and they are so full of flavour despite being tiny in the size of their fruit. I used to weed them out but I like them now. Alchemilla mollis as mentioned already, astrantia and hellebores for shady places. For very low maintenance pots, on sunny terraces for people who go away often,  I recommend Erigeron karvinskianus for those engulfing daisy clouds. 

• What about movement – do you choose plants that sway/nod? (we're thinking of grasses for this!)

• I do but I don’t like tumbleweed dry looking grasses. One of my favourite more luscious grasses that will like to be in a big pot in dappled shade is the bamboo like chasmanthium latifolium . It takes its time to germinate but once it does it’s wonderful as an established clump that will send up little dangling seeds that look like fish-scales. 

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I do get it. People get very defensive of their favourite period dramas. Yes, I went to see Wuthering Heights today and it was a Cinema worthy watch.

The cinema entrance was depressing however, all automatic tills, no one there hugely bizarre. You scan your phone now to get in but I suppose I do that to get into a train station these days but it all felt very space world terminal like to me, especially with the lighting.

As I put though, I understand the defence of a period drama book adaptation that for whatever reason your heart belongs to.

Immediately, I felt huge dislike at the trailer for the upcoming Netflix series of Pride and Prejudice, out this autumn apparently but I will not be watching, not my generation sweetheart. I am forever in the camp of the 2005 version and the topic for why is for another read.

So if I had knowledge of Wuthering Heights to which shamefully, I do not, I have not read the book, I have not seen previous screen works of it. Then I could be seething as I have seen many reviews that have been. But for me I saw this film, as a film in its own right. I did not want to leave the film half way through so that is a good sign I think and that was despite me needing a wee so I must have wanted to see every scene! With all the endless crap going on in todays increasingly AI geared world, we need film more than ever. I left my phone in my friend Bee’s car glove compartment, much recommended, do not take your phone to the cinema.

Firstly, it is beautifully shot, gothic and is truthful to the Yorkshire weather and winter. All swamp like on the moors not a bit of flowering heather to be seen just brown and dark grey endless mist, snow nasty weather that I hate. You do feel the damp and yard shit and blood quite well. The films soundtrack by Charlie xcx, I thought worked well, harrowing and not eclipsing as I was concerned it might have been.

I do not think there is one sound of even a curlews calls to be heard. In fact, aside from horses and the killing cries of a pig and sex, the romance is longed for bizarrely. And of course there is a lot of longing, huge longing, crazed longing in the end, the romance comes in almost too late in the form of letters never read in any case. It was to me, painfully sad of lessons of love and I made too many self comparisons. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing. But I thought Heathcliff was a moody arsehole, of course she had to get married he pissed off for a bloody year, daft sod. I’m sure the book gives a more detailed account as to why. Oh and I do wonder if David Austin sales of their Emily Bronte shrub rose with its perfume of lemon and grapefruit are suddenly on the up? Apparently, sales of the book have sky rocketed as one would expect. The films few garden scenes are positively Alice and Wonderland esq but then this aspect you have to accept in order to enjoy the film at all. As is admitted the costumes are anything but true by and large of the period but they are ravishing and superbly rich none the less as Robbie is corseted in and out of them at length, tightly. But I loved her snowqueen like dressing gowns the most.

I thought though that Martin Clunes, who I had not read any reports of in fact being in the film despite the Instagram highlights of the films studded film premiere tour was superb and hugely needed as the Jekyll and Hyde alcoholic, gambling father. At times he was somewhat oddly, the only light hearted dame that period dramas always need but this mask was worn only for seconds before the darkness of his true character showed. He also has the only apt grossly bad teeth of the period to be seen in the entire film, albeit ones made worse by his drinking. In fact, the most moving scene for me was Cathy finding her father dead in the poison of drink.

Whoever made the cakes and jellies wants an Oscar, the film feels at times like you are immersed in an Rococo period trifle but what a waste of eggs under the bed sheets. And the Jewellery, my god the jewels worn by the stupendous Margot Robbie, especially in one scene where she is to be seen wearing little bits of star dust droplets on her cheeks. She really does carry the films main casting with great clout and she does make Emerald Fennell’s efforts reach heights of the piece being far more film rather than it being another numbingly Netflix worthy thing. And plus, who can resist a punch and Judy opener, even one with the graphic visuals of a hanging.

The sun was out today for the first time properly this year and it shone on a pile of much loved and never to be sent to the village phone box library or charity shopped away books. I thought therefore, that I’d start this simple series of my favourite books, looking back to a time when books were truly special and if you wanted to do one you really had to make them beautiful. Most of this series will focus on photographic books, to my peril I am not a great reader aside from the tales of Beatrix Potter that we shall get to.

Country by Jasper Conran, photographed by Andrew Montgomery shows immense visual effort. To get photos like this, the writer and photographer have to put many days aside in the diary, arranging visits across country to houses, gardens, smallholdings, country fairs, fetes, estates and fields and lanes to capture such visuals.

‘‘The fact that I am a designer – someone who has worked all his life with fabrics, colours, shapes and textures – does not make me an expert on rural affairs. But when it comes to appreciating the texture of the countryside, I think it might help.” Jasper Conran on the publishing of his book Country in 2010.

What probably all the books that I love have in common is a clear understanding between writer and photographer for the books to feel and say something as you flick the pages. There will also be a very rare thing in having an editor who has an eye too and has a willingness and grace to let you look through the books provisional spreads of the proposed to achieve something that is beautiful, not cluttered and is not trying too hard, that can breathe.

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Country has soul, its the sort of soul rarely produced now in the world of publishing where people increasingly say that people lack the attention that warrants the human eye to want to stop for more than 5 seconds. Apparently that’s why things on Netflix are filmed the way they are, bollocks to that I say.

If I was a rich American moving to the Cotswold’s then I’d hand my interior and garden designers this book and say get on with it, please. I remember when Mr Conran, Jasper followed me on Instagram, a TRUE STAR had followed little red faced albeit very beautifully thin me back then. The beloved Moira Rose line of take a thousand naked photos of yourself now is so bloody true.

Anyway, Jasper has the most wonderous garden flower beds, simple in them being generous rows filled and crammed with the most Alice and Wonderland assortment of roses, mints and forget me nots to name but a few. He was the first person who I saw growing the beautiful, tapestry like silk handkerchief rose Mutablis in large pots either side of the door underplanted with erigeron karvinskianus which looked incredible backed by the old brick of the house. The latter plant he doesn’t allow to be cut back so it grows up like mounds of fizzy thin wire like wigs all over the steps. I like this book because its not really about Jasper’s own home its about what and who surrounds it but you are given views of the countryside from his garden and there are photos of bedrooms, all very Joe Wright Pride and Prejudice Brenda Blethyn oh Mr Bennet 2005 that you’d be very happy to wake up in.

Looking through the pages, I can imagine all the soundtracks that go with the images and it is a book that I love to look at time and time again. Despite it largely concerning places near to Jasper’s home in Dorset it echoes many childhood memories of my greenbelt townie childhood with holidays spent in Derbyshire. A cross pollination of cold, Linby village bonfire nights with hand held sparklers and the last town game butchers who was once Headly Wrights on Watnall Road that dared to have braces of pheasant hanging by the door.

An appreciation for a proper pub can be found here too. Margo Robbie mentioned how impressed she was with the pubs in Yorkshire while filming Wuthering Heights during the films premiere this week. Australians adore and know a good British pub. My distant Aussie relatives Jorge and Faye would pretty much spent 6 weeks rambling between country pubs with my grandparents across Derbyshire and Yorkshire.

Country is a reminder of what to be British for me is, at a time when such a thing is being so and has been, so politically abused to the abuse of us all. It is a tonic and a collective of the most gorgeous, at times unashamedly Jam and Jerusalem, Victoria jam sponge, cold comfort farm, country life goodness. It was published by Conran, Octopus in 2010.

‘Photography allows us to tell powerful stories about the wildlife we share this planet with - a beautiful but increasingly fragile place.

We all have the power to shape the future of the natural world and we all have our part to play in helping to find solutions to the planetary emergency.’ - Natural History Museum.

Here are my personal favourites and you can vote for your favourite and view all the entries past and present here

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Beauty Against the Beast

Alexandre Brisson

Lesser flamingos stand out against a stark industrial backdrop of power lines.

After a 10-hour drive, Alexandre arrived at this bird sanctuary in Walvis Bay, Namibia, just as the sun was setting. The image shows how even spaces meant to protect wildlife carry the signs of human expansion and the risks to wildlife they often entail, many birds fall victim to overhead powerlines and aircraft.

SOLVIN ZANKL’S IMAGE - mason bee at work

Solvin Zankl (Germany) carefully watches a two-coloured mason bee build the roof of its nest.

FORTUNATO GATTO’S IMAGE - old man of the glen

Fortunato Gatto (Italy) comes across a gnarled old birch tree, adorned with pale ‘old man’s beard’ lichens.

ANTONIO LIEBANA NAVARRO’S IMAGE - preening hornbills

Antonio Liebana Navarro (Spain) contrasts the crescent-like curved bills of a bonding pair of Asian pied hornbills.

ROBERTO MARCHEGIANI’S IMAGE calm after the storm

Roberto Marchegiani (Italy) watches as a group of Baringo giraffes is caught in wet weather. This rare subspecies had been wiped out in Kenya because of poaching, farming and habitat destruction.

In 1997 the Kenyan government reintroduced Baringo giraffes to Lake Nakuru. Today, their population is increasing steadily.

KARINE AIGNER’S IMAGE - learning to be free

Karine Aigner (USA) delves into the relationship between Cuban culture and songbirds, and explores the future of a deep-rooted tradition.

THOMAS SCHWARZE’S spring snowflake morning

Thomas Schwarze (Germany) provides a simultaneous view of spring snowflake flowers and the treetops of a woodland in Elkenroth, Germany.

For the first few seconds of this long exposure, Thomas focused his camera on the woodland floor and its carpet of spring snowflake flowers. Partway through, he tilted it upwards towards the canopy. This superimposed two perspectives in a single frame.

Dustin Chen- Marvellous Spatuletail

A male marvellous spatuletail hummingbird shows off its long tail while it feeds on flowers. Dustin spent two weeks watching birds at Huembo Lodge in Pomacochas, Peru. Deforestation from logging and farming have eroded the habitat of countless South American birds. Now, this particular hummingbird is restricted to a small area in the Andes of northern Peru.

EMMANUEL TARDY’S no place like home

Emmanuel Tardy (France) spots a brown-throated three-toed sloth clinging tightly to a barbed wire fence post. Traffic slowed to a crawl as this sloth crossed the road. Eventually it reached a fence post and gripped firmly.

Sloths’ habitats are becoming increasingly fragmented. This forces them to make more ground crossings to reach the safety of the next tree.

In response, the Costa Rican government and local organisations are creating biological corridors, including aerial bridges for the sloths but many are still victims of fatal road crossings in the meantime.

The weather as it goes without typing, has been hard on the land and those of us who have to be out in it this month. I rent what was formerly set aside ground and their was good reason for it being so, its rather boggy in the winter. Not ideal conditions for poultry as hens don’t thrive in marshland. The first year of keeping hens here, two years ago has been a steep learning curve of understanding how the land works and what it needs to not become a sea of mud. However we have learnt a few thing of vital management that I’ll share, shelter and good pasture are two essentials of ensuring contented chickens.

Known as Cotswold brash, the land here has a pathetic amount of top soil that gives way to a thin layer of clay before endless stone. This creates a sieve like mix that holds onto the winter wet and then it drains immediately come spring should the April showers, as seems to be the pattern, fail. By June of 2025, this part of the world was desperate for a drink and by August, the fields became near dustbowls.

Being a walker a cycler, you notice the stress of the land much more. Either wading through water logged swamp like fields or kicking up the dust of dying wildflower savannahs, who knows what climate change has in store for us this year. For now, me and my hens like much of the country are coping with yet another season of winter monsoon.

I am very proud of maintaining grass in my hen run, its about a fenced quarter of an acre. Without grass, the eggs of hens taste poorly and lack that really smile inducing buttercup yellow colour upon them being cracked.

The grass I keep well mown with an electric hawksmoor mower - Hens don’t graze grass well. They tip peck it so cutting it keeps it thick and even and I re- sow any stressed areas in the autumn, fencing the sown areas off with bamboo canes and encircled chicken wire.

Grass seed needs to be a robust mix, and clover is helpful for areas that are suffering from dry summers along with the clover I sow a poultry pasture mix .

I do not keep ducks due to the them dabbling up grass roots, it is almost impossible to maintain grass in an area where a large number of ducks are contained unless it is especially large. It is also worth noting that too many hens make it very hard to maintain grass in a run too. Overstocking ensures stale earth as the fresh droppings of hens are high in ammonia.

For small hen runs, the idea of turning a fruit cage into such a place for the hen house to be within is a good idea. The fruit bushes will be enjoyed as shade by the hens and more so especially when they fruit, to observe a hen jumping for a red currant is fantastic entertainment!

Poultry droppings, mature and woody tall stemmed black and red currants, gooseberries and raspberries will cope with, they will welcome the nitrogen. In static, constantly in use hen runs such as a fruit cage or a traditional hen run, regular, monthly dressings of wood chippings, sought from local tree surgeons are essential by the generous bag full, often several bag fulls along with applications of a poultry ground sanitiser This will ensure no bad odours and prevent the earth becoming muddy and stale.

Originally, I had planned to have my hen houses that are the Domestic Fowl Trust pent houses as moveable units but again to help the grass they are not actually moved. An ill thought purchase of requiring them, needlessly to be on expensive wheels. I like these houses, they are all painted internally with a white cuprinol matt quick dry emulsion to assist in the summer battles of red mites. The hen run floors here where the hens feeders hang, are bedded down weekly in the winter wet with wood chippings and chopped straw. This is possible as the roofs of these hen houses with their attached runs, help keep the litter dry. Plastic Omlet houses with their attached runs, allow this deep littering to happen too as they have rain covers.

A hen run open to the elements in the winter is no good at all for the birds. Hens dislike the wet and wind and will suffer if they cannot get out of it. To help keep the litter sweet it is topped up weekly at this time of the year

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Some areas outside the hen houses that suffer from heavy traffic, my footwork of cleaning out around housing and the hens themselves during the winter do not maintain grass well especially around popholes and doorways as my wellies and their yellow stockings of claws churn into the mud.

Here, a loose but fine stone mix of hardcore can dress areas, hoggin is a cost-effective, natural aggregate composed of clay, sand, and gravel that can cope well here and can be used to make solid paths that are pleasing in pasture and orchard like areas.

Alternatively grass matts are the saviour if you wish to try and keep grass and not create endless mud but they are around £20 each. I spent a huge amount on them and I cannot work out if they are better being kept above the grass or if letting the grass grown through them to engulf them was the right thing. They look awful when they have been freshly put down but since they have sunk into the ground, this winter they do not seen as effective. To lift them all will be a real pig of a job and whole squares of grass will be lost in the process so I am hoping I will not have to do this.

I avoid slabs as as pathways around the hens as once a lot of these are laid down it can result in rats attempting to burrow under them. Equally, I avoid placing scaffold planks down because I’ve seen these become slippery boobie traps!

In bad weather, hens will not stay inside the hen houses, once they are off their perches they want to leave the hen house, returning during the day to lay but rarely to shelter in it until dusk when they return to roost for the evening.

During the day, they want to range out and about, even my Buff Cochins, despite their feathered feet wonder at will so a further indulgence my hens have are several hen shelters placed around that I requested Greg of the Domestic Fowl Trust to make, Greg does a great service delivering hen houses and similar dwellings across the country in his truck to gardens, farms and smallholdings, a lot of other companies send things out flat pack! The Shelters are of a wooden frame and an onduline sheet and the hens love them, along with old wooden benches and garden tables.

I’d love to get an old greenhouse for them too on a base of concrete. This I’d then fill with a mix of dry wood ashes, kilned dry sand and old spent compost or dry, composted leaf litter. The whole thing they would love as a dust bath. Hens and indeed cocks too must be able to dust bath so that they can keep themselves clean and their feather in good order. They can only do this in dry and fine soil. My flock have a parlour for this from flyte so fancy shelter which is like an open facing kennel with a solid base which I asked them to supply. This sits on some sand stones and is used by everyone most days especially in the sunshine, a queue forms and much bickering occurs until several birds begin to roll about and beat their wings into the fine mix, its wonderful to watch them do this.

Lastly it might be a good idea, if you are getting muddy eggs to place a hessain doormat at the front of your hens pop hole this way they will wipe their claws as they come and go from their nesting boxes.

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I cycled today, like most days. I’m still classing it as cycling despite the bike being electric, its hardly a car. Its not been unlocked to go above 25 or whatever speed is calculated so I’m not acting like I’m delivering food on behalf of that dire culture that is Deliveroo, speeding like a rocket along country roads. It is a wonderful heavy thing that helps us get about, I don’t know how we managed before.

The we, is ‘we’ are sharing it, so its a bit of a child. You have it today, sort of divorce situation. I like bubba to have it, it suits him better than me albeit it needs a new front mud guard fitting. I’m more suited to the oddly reliable old donkey, an almost rusting mountain bike that leans against Jimmy and Charlottes bench on their driveway but admittedly I prefer the electric for going a distance on. I waited for the rain to stop today. It rained like the tropics which is becoming the artificial norm isn’t it for English rain. It is so dense and hard, all in a violence and its been endless this week. How do the robins cope!? There is a pair pairing up in the cottage garden which brings good cheer, I wonder when and where they will choose to nest.

I left my phone on charge when I left to cycle down to Lechlade as I’m trying hopelessly to have less time on it. It is the devil, it hasn’t earned me enough money to be worthy of the time wasted on it. Devoid of phone and headphones, I enjoyed listening to a skylark as I cycled, it was so high up in the sky, incredible. That little singing body smaller than a bean bag miles high and trembling in song.

Do they usually sing in January? I’ve just tried to check that on the RSPB website. It is still a question but a glance of this screen shows the dear skylark is now classed as being red listed due to dramatic and recent declines, UGH an England of no skylarks but then its hardly surprising that such spirit is struggling.

So off I went on the electric bike. The butcher has got the last of the pheasant parcels. They wrap them with some stuffing and bacon that are worth putting into the deep freeze, they are wonderful, £2.50 gorgeous with red cabbage. I adore game, knowing the cleanness of the kill, no plastic crates, catching gangs or lorries stuffed full of agony required. I like honest death as I mentioned with killing the occasional chicken a few weeks ago. , l’d opt for being shot in the run of panic and you get a lot of meat actually off a pheasant. I try not the think of the bacons end journey though probably involving Co2. Christ but who said I was a purist? Me, never.

Food wise though Sugar is out supposedly, Berberine tablets are in, they are much needed to try and curb it. I failed yesterday buying olive oil. I bought these biscuits too and had the whole packet when I got back from the cold and windy bike ride with tea but I think the Berberine is helping if I am not within visa debit card of temptations.

These I found within a Holland and Barret shop, strangely within the cathedral of hell that is a Tesco extra, we are back in Nottingham now - the good pheasant parcel butcher is in Lechlade on Thames. Back to the Tesco, Holland and Barret, why strange? Well having a little store like box stuffed, brimming with health supplements, plonked within the rows of endlessly processed food of a supermarket, one wonders how long this collaboration between stores will last for.

You’d think it would at least, be within arms reach of a punnet of blueberries albeit with them shipped in from god knows where, who’s to call them a health food at all in January?

White naughty, processed refined sugar beat sugar has to go. I don’t like new years resolutions its the worst time of the year to start fasting, why would you now. I can’t stand being advised by anyone who goes on holiday to find the sun in January, February or March on health!

My Instagram algorithm is bursting with usually welcome array of muscle mary gay men who seem to live between the gym and or the sun-drenched holidays of their only fans pocket money being spent on far distant shores. But these are now mixed with an endless array of Ozempic pill alternatives.

I don’t like ozempic face, especially what it can do to a mans, too much and it seems to me that it turns them into a hollow poorly hen faces. Each to their own, I know its got its place and so many people are on it, a lot of people are on it. I tried it for 3 weeks 2 years ago but I don’t like self injecting (I know its a tiny click thing) and it gave me vertigo when i tried it.

At 33 and having not stepped foot in the gym I know its almost a life that I won’t know. I ended up having a chat with a personal trainer Stefan in the week who I followed on instagram and he then messaged me asking if I would like a free chat about what he could do for me. I agreed, he has done very well for himself, a former Amazon delivery driver now seemingly living a life of an Adonis in luxury in Germany. But who knows if the luxurious apartments he walks through are in fact his own, we shall never know! We went though my goals and aspirations, he fired questions that I had to answer on a scale of one to ten are you this and that regarding my feelings, pitifully low units there - 4 this, 3 that I think the odd one was 6. He advised magnesium so I am taking that now each day along with other pills. I’ll need a pill box like my gran soon!

Anyway Stefan was very nice, beautifully deeply voiced, commanding of course. you I’d sexually fantasied him within moments, he goes around with a batman mask on for fucksake after all but then came his pricing for these programmes that promised huge bodily and lifestyle riches. They started at 3 thousand pounds. I’ve got 3 thousand pounds but I wasn’t expecting it either the talk about mental health and supplements turned to a slightly cold calling selling pitch albeit by a very handsome salesman who you would let inside for a coffee and continued conversation.

Why not? He rightfully asked as I hesitated at the price all a bit Little Mermaid quibbling with the sea witches terms of payment, this will change your life, he had had impressive client pedigree but rather than transfer the money as he was wishing there and then I said that I needed to think about it so the call ended and then I watched Judi Dench on bbc iplayer with her parrot which thankfully took me out of myself. Sorry Stefan back you go to being a screen fantasy unpaid for, sorry.

Until this point in my life, I’ve been very comfortable naked. But less so lately . Helena Bonham Carter talks about this on Fashion Nurosis

I’ve been a sugar comfort eater since my early teens. I’d happily eat a pack of 4 yum yum donuts from Marks and Spencer’s one after the other in haste, blindly. Lets say if I’d be travelling on a train for a few hours and you know when your salvia is in full sugar hunt mode and until lately that’s been my daily diet very often.

Suddenly though you hit early thirties and the sugar syrup is not just seemingly going into thin air but its forming a not huge (most people would say don’t be stupid) but the inner tube like half flat tyre of fat around the hips and the belly is there those people don’t have my body, I can feel it all, I don’t like it, its got to go . Its cake and biscuits not sugary drinks they were always forbidden at home and I don’t drink wine BUT I adore cake, muffins, bread and butter, scones can’t have them in the house. So another denied pleasure.

It’s February now anyway so social media going from being told we can be in hibernation will start to insist we wake up and start various fads. Great. I’m going back to sleep I have an eye infection. More soon.

Arthur x

And so the full blown horror of not having home grown tarragon is weighing heavy on my mind along with this kill of the week, perhaps both are serving a good purpose at avoiding realities.

Luckily chef, went to London and found the mythical winter tarragon in a large Waitrose offering, gut churningly as its wrapper declares, the sprigs have come all the way from Kenya. So out the window goes this Sunday dinner being free of air miles but who’d be a purist, let alone a vegan here? Don’t answer that one.

Apparently, tarragon is well worth growing and then freezing before winter sets in, it does not keep its flavour as a dried creation so sprigs are best frozen. My curiosity of herbs, continues to grow so tarragon is top of the list of growing this coming season. I wonder if Jennifer Patterson grew it on her London fire escape, she had a little herb garden here as mentioned in her converses several times with Clarissa. There is apparently a story that Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon for her reckless use of Tarragon, I can hear Clarissa saying this line at a perfect pitch!

A city microclimate I think would be the only way to hope of having Tarragon to pick freshly in the winter. Either that or a pot of it in a heated greenhouse if you were in the country. learn more about Tarragon here

Back to the chicken that now demands Tarragon. He was a young cock who had become poorly sighted and was wondering aloof. Dearest Dame Judi Dench says she can’t see peoples faces anymore and that she cannot see the floor.

Understandably he was a nervous thing and not making the best of it, unlike thankfully the determination of dearest Dame Judi.

Walking about due to this impairment, it was as if he was on egg shells. His flock mates had outcast him as inferior, no longer part of the teenage young club, his brothers taking the debutante sister hens off, away from such vulnerability.

Within the ranks of poultry society, the infirm and disabled are quickly pecked away at or worse bullied horribly. It was a sunny morning and I myself had also grown tiered of seeing this member of the flock not improve so I easily picked up the cockerel as he clearly could not see my advances.

Under my arm, my hands swiftly onto his fluffy legs, we went behind the shed all very Mr Tweedy from Chicken Run. One has to put oneself into such bastard characters to cope really. He was a great weight and not at all ill but the decision was made in my mind already.

Pull down, twisting the neck and flick the palm upwards. The good and wise words of poultry woman Victoria Roberts from her excellent education that is poultry at home as I did the deathly deed. Its all awful and I am not pleased or proud of any of this.

Trying to avoid my arm coming out of its shoulder socket in the name of a swift kill one has to be very confident and not unnerved with this action. The cocks nerves entered spasm immediately, the wings upright and flapping against my legs his neck broken to the text book letter.

I carried the heavy body of the bird down to the lower field. Far too good to become red kite or fox fodder and so I found a log and I sat and began plucking, quietly I dare even say it was therapeutic somehow. I like plucking, a single bird that is I’ve plucked turkeys for Christmas before which is a thankless miserable task in truth. It is a skill done best to a birds still warm body. You start with the wings, because the primary feathers and the pin feathers of the wings edge prove difficult to dislodge once a corpse goes cold and then the rest of the feathers you take in your hand and pull sharply but not violently at their base. You have to be careful not the tear the skin at all so its a task for nimble fingers.

Soon the cockerel was starting to look more like a posh bird you might see for sale in Harrods perhaps or a French market with his beautiful yellow feet shining in the sun. I was pleased and proud of him.

He was a very good weight and there was not a louse nor a mite on him, thanks to him dustbathing all his life no doubt. Once naked, bar a lot of wire hair like tuffs that a candle later frazzled off, I put him in my rucksack and walked back.

Its been so cold that I left him in the woodstore over night in a bag for life which made gutting him the following day harder than usual. Florist scissors prove good for the breaking of the neck bone and taking the legs off and then the car crash dire affair of gutting which I wish I could make a better job of but he still looked good and very Daylesford Organic in looks once trussed and put on his back on a nice blue willow China plate.

He will probably be the only chicken that I will willingly eat this year. I eat little meat and would rather know each animal that I do choose to eat. I adore game due to it experiencing a clean death of the gun, no slaughter houses need be in existence if us meat eaters chose venison and I would launch a national campaign for us to get eating this very good meat if I was the health secretary!

The rest of the flock was seemingly unaware at one of their number being now lost. The hens, if they had any mind about them perhaps would be thinking, well that’s one up and coming young rapist gone.

When did I stop being a softy? I still am, believe it or not, especially so to hens and any cockerels who become breeding males that are then fatally given a name.

Give someone a name and indeed the chicken becomes a character and a friend and so if that said bird becomes ill then I cannot usually kill it unless it really is suffering and then you have to get on with it but usually I can never kill my hens its not why I keep chickens. I keep them until they die naturally and if they become poorly then it will require often a vet consultation at great expense. And good poultry vets are a rare thing anyway, you might as well often chuck £20 notes into the air. I’ve heard so many horror stories of vets not having a clue when being met with egg bound hens, its dreadful.

Old cockerels I try and find homes for, last years cockerel went to live in a nice village. A 90 year old lady came to pick him up, driven by a considerate neighbour with a hamper in the boot awaiting him. She wanted a new cockerel as a replacement to her old one who had suffered from a heart attack, interestingly cocks do not often live as long as hens do.

And here is the problem of poultry, spares. Spare males that is. You only need one cockerel to court a flock of girls a year and he will often prove to be one too many so much is the sexual appetite of a young male on the hens. Raping becomes a half hourly offence committed openly, the hens suffer. The feathers become bare from their backs due to cockerels ignorant and clumsy feet that risk tearing the undersides of a hens flesh and then their heads are half plucked of feathers too as the cocks beaks grip them. Fortunately ejaculation is very swift but huge damage through passion overkills can ruin the condition of ones hens for a whole season. They look half plucked and spent, like old madam harlots until they finally moult and grow fresh feathers.

It is increasingly difficult to rehouse cockerels too of late. I blame in part the Air B and B curse of countryside, of little cottages not being homes properly in part to blame. There is an increase of urban lie inners who are allergic to cock-a-doodle dos but in fact some country folk too are not keen on this and hence the land I rent is far away from the nearest house. This means deliveries have to be taken here via wheelbarrow but the distance means cockerels can hopefully crow without complaint.

Some people callously dump such unwanted cockerels in the woods. This is abhorrent to me to abandon a domestic bird who is used to be being fed and pampered and is hugely irresponsible. The best phase perhaps here is don’t hatch if you can’t dispatch!

You can do away with them either at day old if you really must, commercially male chicks are gassed and minced within hours of hatching or do them in as sparrow like growers once that chick cuteness goes, one thinks of Patsy’s line to Eddie during their series 5 hunting weekend of ‘Oh Eddie just pulls its neck’ with reference to an awakened pheasant who has escaped a wardrobe or if like me and you are silly, you’ll wait to do the deed of god once they are near adulthood.

By this moment, they will have almost bankrupted you with an ever growing bill of good poultry feed so its time to settle accounts.

In this case you might as well do them for the pot especially if the cocks are dual purpose meaning that they were originally bred for both eggs and meat.

Whilst it is hens who usually have good breast meat, such cockerels of these breeds will make a decent carcass still and be wonderous for proper chicken stock too with a great flavour especially if they have been reared on grass. I remember the first River Cottage series where Hugh Fernley reared Wyandottes and Cornish game to see which had the best real roast chicken flavour.

With Cochins, my beloveds, they are so slow growing that one does not easily know if one has a cock or a hen chick until the still small golden bird is several months old.

They take a huge amount of time to mature, the best part of a year. At 6 weeks they have barely grown their first set of little wing feathers while their pitiful intensively reared inferior, tasteless often disease ridden, very, very distant modern bred relatives are ready for slaughter.

Slaughtered that is after spending their short lives wallowing in their own waste within warehouse sized, sunless sheds. They cheep still like chicks as they, like living nappy piss white soaked poor beggars are chucked and thrown into crates often at night, violently at great speed by catching gangs and they are then loaded and trucked to be killed at a processing slaughterhouse plant often miles away, risking the spread of avian flu in their wake but you won’t be told this, you’ll be told its spread by wild birds or by people like me whose birds don’t go anywhere and live as naturally as is possible.

I will add here as it is of interest, that commercially, regardless of labels that Free range production as we know it of birds being able to go outside has been on hold since November 6, as a nationwide lockdown was introduced by Defra for poultry farms in England and Wales rendering such production solely as barn reared and laid. While initially “free range” birds kept inside had to be rebranded as being “barn reared” after 12 weeks, you might remember seeing some free range egg boxes in supermarkets having a barn laid stamp on them for a time, this public disclosure is no longer required. Defra, The Department of Food and Rural Affairs quietly changed the law in September 2024 after industry pressure to allow farmers to keep the free range label no matter how long their flocks might be mandatorily required to be shut into their barns for. In both 2021-22 and 2022-3, the 16-week derogation period was exceeded by six and seven weeks respectively.

The only eggs I can recommend buying if you can find them are those laid by Paddy and Steph's hens of Cacklebean whilst not deemed as organic because Paddy prefers rightly, to feed his hens on locally grown crops rather than organically deemed soya that has to be shipped often in from distant shores, I know the hens here, despite them being inside have plenty of room and are very well cared for.

To be honest hens don’t like to be out in the winter wet and wind that much anyway. Provided they are given plenty of stimulation through fresh bedding and straw bales to peck at commerical flocks if well managed and cared for and if given a lower stocking density can be comfortable indoors over the winter months whilst the risk of bird flu is especially high. The industry however must be supported in ensuring high indoor welfare can realistically be encouraged arguably in my view by the supermarkets most producers supply.

Also Cacklebean rehome their hens at the end of their commercial lives which believe me is a much happier end than other supposedly premium eggs, I adore the shoebox like egg boxes too.

‘I once had a very bad tempered Light Sussex Cock which flew at people claws first and made a nasty mess of their legs. My father wrung his neck and he was sent in a jelly (the cock not my father) to an ill person who lived nearby. The cross creature had simply been turned into the best stock. In days gone by all poultry ended up as bones shimmering in a pot as a matter of course. The very idea of throwing away a chicken carcass or burying old hens whose laying days were done would have shocked the older generation who would have thought it a wicked waste of valuable food.’

Deborah Devonshire from The Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth Cookery Book.

I hope this honest approach to knowing food will not upset readers and if you cannot cope with culling your own chickens for the pot then I do recommend ’s range of Daylesford chickens as she has committed to ensuring the welfare of poultry with unrivalled passions indeed Daylesford’s entire life cycle of organic, slow growing birds is fully under her Daylesford high welfare umbrella regardless of bird flu lock downs preventing current free ranging. You can learn more about the way they rear their birds here - Daylesford chickens all this effort has resulted in Daylesford being awarded a guild of Fine Food Great Taste award in 2025.

Wishing you a delicious and thoughtful culinary 2026 - Arthur Parkinson.

I love the pomp of dahlias and now we have lots of time to ponder those we wish to plant in the coming spring.

This is my first Subby of the year of 2026, so cheers everyone. Everyone had a good New Year? Who cares really? Who starts again in bloody January? I don’t.

I don’t want to diet now, pass the chips, I’m going for bath, if I’m lucky. And Instagram is driving me mad with these wonderfully sounding appetite suppression pills and Korean promising face masks from doubtfully truthful looking websites but we shall resist these dear readers as the world is on the brink of a world war. We lucky ones can wonder garden centre isles and farm shops. That’s my business here, for now anyway.

I’ve written 3 books over the years -The Pottery Gardener , The Flower Yard and Planting a Paradise that you’ll no doubt find as nice and cheap presents to yourselves on ebay or in brand new temptations from the devil (Amazon)

If you want good in depth chapters on dahlias then my books have them but I’ll try and pinch out some good tip bits of dahlia info here and in the coming weeks.

I know wants slug details. I’m going to do slugs separately in the coming weeks for you Jenny, its title is going to be DEALING WITH JENNY ECLAIRS SLUG this post is just to help refresh your dahlia desires here.

On my rented bit of land that I’m clinging to as the sight of my dear hens within its (touch wood) safe fences keeps me going, I have my dahlia bed here in its middle fenced off from claw and beak. I’ve decided to expand it because dahlias are good for me to grow here and I bloody love them.

And so I’ve already ordered some new ones from Farmer Gracy dahlia beach and Rose Cottage Flowers bought some directly yesterday from Burford Garden co

I liked physically seeing the tubers yesterday at Burford and feeling their octopus, old man bollock like cocks for firmness and size. Very good compared to some of the things that arrive in the post looking like they have been kicked around a Dutch or British packing centre by a bunch of sealions gutting an unfortunate Humboldt penguin, resulting in the tubers all fallen off and broken. If you do receive tubers in the post that arrive like this, complain immediately and email in a photo to customer services - good suppliers should send replacements or refund you.

The dahlias on the land that I rent, over winter in the ground. This is thanks to the mountains of straw and hen muck that goes around and on top of them, enriching and insulating them in the very poor soil here that is of a small layer of top soil then of clay and rock. I don’t lift the tubers, they stay tucked up here, under an ever added to confetti of Buff Cochin guano.

The dahlia bed above, slumbering.

This both insulates and nourishes them so at the moment the dahlia bed is all a sea of bumps and mounds with the odd deliberately left old stem, signalling where the tubers left in from last year are.

I cut them all down in October, once the flower production slowed due to the fading light levels and dug out any varieties that I found I wasn’t picking much of which I’m not sorry about. Never grow stuff you don’t love, plants aren’t like family members, you aren’t keen on, you can compost them at any moment!

This dahlia bed cut and dig around task is a more fun job to do before a frost turns all the foliage to horrid old lettuce in the fridge.

The dahlias should start to wake up by May usually around Chelsea Flower Show, they come up through the mulch happily and then each row of them is staked but I’ll cover that another time. But now is the time to source or forage coppiced hazel rods and birch too for staking later in the season whilst its dormant.

I do the odd summer wedding/party/wake for people who ask and understand that they’ll get what they are given by and large but it will be bloody gorgeous but simple show stopping show . They get crate loads of my beautiful vintage bud vases holding masses of single elegant dahlia stems. I don’t do f-ing arches or things in the air but I do put work into my bud vases so if someone wants fireplace surrounds, cakes and marquee tables brimming with flowers as they should be in water within beautiful glasses then do dm me.

So what am I wanting and liking from dahlias?

Well increasingly I want pudding colours - cream, custard, raspberries. I still want some mulberry dark reds but not too many. I want stars much more, lots and lots of stars, excitable and dripping with nectar. I want that ending scene of Vanity Fair of Reese Wetherspoon as Becky atop an elephant pretty much, god I love that film.

Quite a tall order then but dahlias can deliver these feelings, I promise you. Here are my choices for 2026.

Each listed Variety I have put a link to but unfortunately not one single supplier has all of them under one roof and as I put, you may wish to physically buy them and support on foot retailers, I do a mix of both.

A recipe for planting combinations - A riot for bees and the vase

mixed together within a flower bed or in a large row of the cutting garden

D. Princess Nadine

D.Honka Fragile

D.Waltzing Mathilda

PLANT inbetween in a zig zag or in its own row between varieties seed grown - Pancium frosted explosion grass

I began this rant saying dahlias for spring and by spring I mean the real spring that is April. April onwards is the month to pot up dahlia tubers and not before. Dahlia tubers before then should be placed somewhere dark, cool but above all not damp or frosty nor somewhere too warm so not under the kitchen table really, more perhaps the attic or spare bedroom with the winter heating off.

Compost being bought for potting dahlias up into should be peat free, of its class the best I have found is Melcourt It is expensive admittedly but it does get the tubers off to a good growing start. Store compost somewhere dry, out of the winter rain and damp so it is not wet and cloggy when it comes to using it. This is important when it comes to potting dahlia tubers up but I won’t be thinking of planting any of these newly mentioned dahlias up until April.

When it comes to potting new dahlia tubers up, I mean placing each odd potato alien like creature of firm starch, appendage composition into either a 2 or more likely 3 litre plastic pot. This pot should then be placed in a frost free greenhouse or cool windowsill indoors. But I’ll do another post about getting them going, nearer the time. Until then happy choosing.

Have fun and with thanks, Arthur x

My dad bought me back to GL7 yesterday from native Nottingham which was kind. Actually I was spoilt because he picked me up before Christmas too and so as a result, I haven’t got the flu which I would probably of got because otherwise I’d of been travelling on the trains due to stupid mind that won’t learn to drive but I’m beating myself up about that and anyway the traffic hitting Stow-on-the Wold was dire, everyone spilling out back into London. The little towns, this one and Burford are hot potted up with Traffic due to small main streets and traffic lights. But it was luxury still to get back this way rather than the train either via London to Swindon or Worcestershire Parkway to Charlbury.

I wanted to get back to the hens. This is the tie of animals, you struggle to leave them and when you do you feel guilty AND then I get annoyed at being the odd one who only has this seemingly to worry about imagine if in order to produce a christmas dinner we all had to take care of a farmyard and kitchen garden, that would make a good reality tv series actually. The breaking of the trusted routines, the checking in, even though everything is set up for them to be very pampered and well fed and safe, its a worry and so now I am back and typing this.I should be writing and finishing my flower book proposal but I have bad mental block today so at least I’ll do this substack, which is nice.

I suppose that I was badly behaved on Boxing Day, because it was so very beautiful and full sun so I gardened at my mums alone with my mum at my grandmars awaiting the arrival of my brother. Here, I mostly raked up an area of adopted ground opposite her cottage that we call the orchard. A slightly romanced terminology for what are four or five trees really planted too closely together most would deem.

I really needed the time outside, quietly trundling about raking up clods of grass, hard pruning the roses and making the fallen apples look a bit neater to reveal the tight little peaking clumps of snowdrops. There are nettle stings as a result of pulling them that made my fingers buzz hours later and the mud has stained my nails badly. Despite two baths and scrubbing they still don’t look presentable, I never learn to wear gloves which is foolish.

This is a teardrop spec of shaped ground that was formed due to the now endlessly roaring towns inner relief road about ten years ago now. Its just fettled a little bit, it can look scruffy. I want the look of sort of half still tendered to allotment plot. The opposite look to my grandmar Sheila’s well mulched over flower bed, where her elephant watering can, now looks very proud amongst the black raked over compost.

In the Orchard, clumps of nettles are allowed for the butterflies but at this time of the year, its roughly cleared in its middle so that the snowdrops can soon start to show themselves off through the young hawthorn hedge that surrounds it.

The cardoons of wonderous William Morris curtain print design, I cut back hard. As its been mild, they are still quite big and floppy, quite out of proportion to the little snowdrop bells to come. This is a look of shabby gardening but still with control and thought of the overall oil painting. Its my favourite sort of gardening really. Not too careful, not too primed like that favourite old jumper or scarf, tatty but lovely.

I have hopes this area gets visits from hedgehogs. We have put in little baths of water for them using an old dustbin lid and an old stone bird bath too, plus the raked up bits and cut down pruning’s of buddleia are mounded up as a big pile, if not for hedgehogs, then for bugs.

These snowdrops that the cardoon leaves have been chopped back for, I liberated about two years ago from a building site on the other side of my home town. Along the bypass some old grazing land long taken hold of by bramble had been freshly cleared and trawled, with the wooden posts banged in and sprayed red, signalling the new build houses that were soon to be built here.

It was February and a vile grey day and yet dancing and peeking up through the clay in the middle of the security panelled off, quite large plot of earth were two huge clumps of snowdrops.

I rescued the lot with determination, taking a fork and spade and two buckets in the dullness of that days dusk. With a wheelbarrow awaiting the buckets tucked into the hedge that I crawled through by the pavement, I then trundled back with them, wellies cladded in clay. I divided up the snowdrops between the little bit of land here, my grandmar sheila’s garden and my dads garden and some also went to the Linby village parish too to be planted on the verges there.

Large clumps of Snowdrops are heavy little cities of congested bulblets. They must be pulled apart as much as you can be bothered to do, into ideally trios of just 3 bulbs and then you throw them across a flower bed or plot of land, dobbing them in where they land in order to create a naturalised look.

Snowdrops hate to be above ground so never buy them as dormant bulbs as they establish poorly but plant them in the green when they are in active growth in good haste. I also learnt of late that snowdrops do poorly in small pots because little pots are liable to freeze even these hardy dainties of winter too much.

Division of them, often, is key. They like to be split up and replanted every few years and this effort will result in snowdrop gardens and meadows awakening like magical snowdrifts. They truly are a very uplifting little flower to warm the mind with at a time when ones own head can become unbelievably heavy and congested into itself.

The Nottinghamshire snowdrops will be in full bloom by the first week of February I would imagine if not before it depends how mild the winter chooses to be, it could turn to artic tundra we have many weeks of it ahead of us! When they do bloom though I recommend visiting Newstead Abbey near to my native Hucknall to see them in Monk’s wood there and if you are in GL7, the church yard of Cirencester Cathedral is full of them. It is very movingly beautiful to seeing such determined trembling and elegant, silent beauty amongst the headstones there naturally decorating them . Of course, there are many gardens that open for snowdrops and hellebores including two of my favourites that are Coton Manor, Northamptonshire 7/8th Feb; 14/15th Feb and 21/22nd Feb 2026 and Easton Walled Garden near Grantham open from 11th February 2026. I should add that while Sissingurst in Kent is not really known for snowdrop time, there are some beautifully large cultivated ones to be found awakening in Vita Sackville-West’s famous and romantic white garden. As one would expect they poke up and nod above the most beautifully iced mulch of the stirring flower beds here. So if you can visit Sissinghurst not just at rose time in June but arguably in late winter, you see the structure of the garden at its best at this time of the year too.

My friend newly joined to substack , Vita’s granddaughter and esteemed author, most recently of The Book of Revelations - Women and their Secrets, spoke very movingly about knowing the garden that is Sissinghurst to Cate Blanchett on radio 4’s The Today Programme over Christmas listen here - play 13 minutes into the episode.

Back to the trees above the snowdrops in the orchard. I had dreams of these, when I planted them as bare root saplings some ten years ago now, of the resulting canopy being alive with blackbirds in the winter as the trees are crab apples. Somewhat foolishly the largest of the two central trees chosen were due to an alluring photo of their large, Snow White pantomime like blood red fruits.

Crab Apple Wisely bears the largest fruits of all crab apples and these are what we have here. Wonderful, that is if you want to make crab apple jelly but the point of choosing them was in thought to them being a feast for blackbirds rather than the faff of muslin cloth and piff .

Alas the envisaged blackbirds today are seldom seen. The dry summer combined with a huge influx of cats seems to have them done for, at the moment. I listened to bird song though on Boxing Day still whilst pottering as the robins and wrens could be heard singing. Goldfinches do well in towns, a pair nested in the Wisteria against mums house last year and the little tiny, fur like rimmed nest tumbled out from it by the autumn with the brood flown long since. A flock of goldfinches is known as a charm. Like the goldfinch nest, the Wisley crab apples have too since fallen off the trees. They are heavy and the first proper late autumn storm sees them drop, like weighty proper antique baubles to the ground.

A smaller fruiting crab apple would hold onto its fruits for longer and look far prettier for it as a result. But still they look very beautiful in their almost fading ruby decaying state mixed with a few yellow fruits of a neighbouring quince tree. I should add as a merit to the Wisley crab apples that they do have an incredibly beautiful and big pink show of blossom before unfurling their copper and bronze spring leaves and they have grown well here, helping to hide the traffic signs on the other side of the wall.

I took some of the Wisley crab apples back with me and have arranged them with what are on the cusp of becoming frazzled Christmas berried arrangements, hawthorn, stinking iris, rosehips and smaller crab apples.

And so now an otherwise bare, compost filled low but large terracotta pot awaiting a stirring of tulips within it has been festooned with red and ruby berries like some sort of Nigella Lawson creation of sprinkled pomegranate seeds festooned and rained down onto cream. The blackbirds here have been pecking it, like its their own table top berried Christmas fruit cake. Its terribly cold here today so they seem glad of the collected offer and I am glad that I also took up my mums offer of packing me back here with a very large slice of her beautiful home made Christmas cake!

Wishing you all a nice few days. Arthur x