The Woodlouse

01/09/2026

The only constant is change

A final visit today to my longest serving garden owners before they move house. It started as therapeutic gardening - my task was as much to help the owner regain their speech after a stroke as it was to be their hands in the garden with them watching - even watching physical activity stimulates the brain to send signals to the muscles, and whilst you can’t get fit through watching sport, it can ready you for movement.

I’m pleased to say her speech and mobility are now much improved & I hope the house move goes well. It also means I have a Tuesday afternoon slot available if anyone needs it.

This garden is by far my smallest, and most formal, most of my gardens are larger woodland gardens.

27/08/2026

Early apples don’t keep as they’re thin skinned, so get them off the tree & eat them fresh, juice them, cook them, preserve them.

These are from a tree in a new garden I’ve not identified yet - wrong shape for Katy, wrong shape & colour for Discovery, not red enough for Red Delicious. Still, I suspect it’s pretty common. I’d check Fruit ID but I’ve completely forgotten my computer password 🫣

03/05/2026

03/05/2026

Do you see em? The two ‘don’t look at us, we are just sticks!’?

Get up close & personal with yr plants 😁

20/04/2026

Perfection

15/04/2026

26 species of bird recorded on the Merlin app within half an our of arriving at yesterdays garden, amazing!

15/04/2026

Well, this garden owner is a keeper, what a spread! And the garden is a keeper too, 20+ bird species within half an hour of starting!

11/04/2026

Wood anemone, Anemone nemorosus, with ‘nemorosus’ meaning ‘of a wooded grove’, it’s so worth learning a bit of botanical Latin.

I love an understory flowering plant and we have many beauties of the deciduous woodland - wood sorrel, primrose, epimedium, Pulmonaria, Omphalodes verna, maianthemum bifolium, the Dicentra from my last post, and this one, the fairies hiding place.

Wood anemone is surely everyone’s favourite? Native white stars in the woods, wild flowers naturally turning bluer with age, though cultivars can have a lot more blue in them from the beginning - the garden owner of this long established patch commented that they start out white then change colour as they age.

For a mid-size, later flowering anemone with this colouring try Eriocapitella rivularis (aka A. rivularis and A. leveillei)

09/04/2026

Well hello small herbaceous Dicentra of the eastern or western United States, might I just say you are looking mighty fine with your bouncy feathery foliage & bonny pouched petals? Nice of you to join us this late spring.

Tell me, how different is the Cumbrian Atlantic Rainforest from your cool, temperate, wet, well drained forests on the other side of the pond? You seem very happy here and we are glad to welcome you to our shade-lovers club with our ferns, mosses, hostas & wood anemones 😍