Gun powder treason and plot started the month off with a bonfire and 'homegrown' firework display for just the family at the campsite. We didn't have an effigy of Guy Fawkes to burn, but we did have a significant 'figure'. Both of my sons have used, over the years, a chest of drawers, painted blue and yellow, which we rescued from a field on the shores of Loch Ness twenty-two years ago, the table we rescued at the same time and painted in the same blue and yellow hues, did not stand quite the same test of time, but this chest of drawers with its assortment of children's stickers has served us well.
With one son now finished at university however and the other looking towards secondary school and revamping his bedroom accordingly, the chest of drawers has rather reached a natural-end and so it was, that it found its way, as an "effigy-to-youth" onto the Fifth of November bonfire.
The sleepiness in the campsite has been usurped by an active period in the wooded glade as the garden takes a bit more shape, to the point where I have started calling it the 'reservoir garden', a name which may stick, as a distinction to the 'campsite paddock'.
We have started managing and rejuvenating the garden boundary wall, which has become unruly with hawthorn and elder and holly, grown far too tall, their bounties unreachable and with ivy rampaging through their branches and over their trunks, smothering and threatening to dismantle the cornish hedge to boot.
Unfortunately the process is going to make some of the hedge look a little bleak and bare for the moment, but I am planning to get some beech hedging planted over the winter to improve the outlook.
And I have been trying to turn an old access cover into a bit of a feature, by revealing some of the wall structure and putting some pots with plants along its edge. Along its upper margins I have also begun creating another path, up to the picnic area. All these improvements are in their early stages, but they are slowly occurring.
When we developed the old water shed into a family changing-room a friend said how nice the rug and cushions in there were, "too nice to put in the changing-room" she said. I think she was wrong (she isn't often wrong.) I love them in this small space. But rather than pack them away over the winter, away from the damp and the snails - who seem to be invading the shed since the campsite closed - I have borrowed said rug and cushions for our living-room to "keep them aired" and I think they look rather nice!
