Lle Llywela

Garden is as ready as it is going to get for the builders to start work tomorrow (landlady said she would be in touch to confirm ETA but hasn't been, so I guess they could turn up at any time). Refugee plants and their temporary pots have been squeezed in everywhere I could find room - crowded onto the patio, jammed in down the alley at the side of the house, squished in out the front, and all tucked up in the topmost corner of the lawn. I haven't had to farm any out to my parents, which is good, although depending on what the builders say when they get here, that could still happen. I'm hoping they won't need that corner of the lawn for their gear and materials!

Work should take about a week or so, I'm told. And then my Garden Recovery Plan (Phase 1) can swing into action!

The Garden Recovery Plan (Phase 1) goes like this:

Step 1: Mow the lawn and trim the edges, flipping heck, I am desperate to do this, it has been an entire season!
Step 2: Dig over the stricken flower bed to loosen up soil compacted by builders' boots and remove any lingering rubble. Also remove weeds that've been taking advantage.
Step 3: Add a layer of fresh (peat free) top soil.
Step 4: Add a layer of (peat free) compost, to give everything a needed boost after all the trauma.
Step 5: Be prepared for next door's cat to consider this an open invitation to make use of this enormous new litter tray with merry abandon.
Step 6: Have fun trying to decide which plant should go where, since I have this opportunity to redesign.
Step 7: Re-plant upward of 150~200 plants in the ground at long last!
Step 8: Water everything in thoroughly.
Step 9: Breathe a sigh of relief.
Step 10: Sweep down the patio and re-arrange permanent pots, now that they no longer have to share space with all the refugees. Some of these are still living with the damage of the wall collapsing on top of them, so there may be some re-potting to do at this stage. At least, having emptied so many (begged, borrowed and bought) pots back into the ground, I will have plenty to choose from!
Step 11: Collapse in a heap and congratulate myself on a job well done.
Step 12: Start thinking about Garden Recovery Plan (Phase 2), which is all about the devastated lawn and contains rather more native wildflowers than it does grass...

Hey, so it's been a while since I used this blog - just listen to those crickets chirping!

I've more or less decided that when my current LJ sub runs out later in the summer, I will cancel it instead of renewing and might even delete the whole journal at that point – or at the very least make it private for a time, before actually committing to pulling the plug. I'll keep the Dreamwidth journal going, for the archive and occasional new post, but with LJ being the way it is these days, it feels like time to let go. Which will mean also losing my photo archive, which is the real shame (DW doesn't offer that pic-hosting facility, so all the images on DW will become defunct once they are deleted from LJ), but such is life. It is time to move on.

For now, though, since I still have the account for a little longer, I decided to break my silence and actually say something! Maybe one or two people might even see it…

First things first: a TV rec. Currently airing on BBC Wales and available on iPlayer is a show called Hidden, which previously aired on S4C under the name Craith. Craith/Hidden comes from the same stable as the acclaimed Y Gwyll/Hinterland and Un Bore Mercher/Keeping Faith, a joint project between S4C and the BBC, filmed in both Welsh and English for different audiences, and this one I think is my favourite yet. If anyone out there liked Broadchurch, you will also like Hidden – but it won't win the publicity Broadchurch had, because it is tucked away on a regional channel, and whereas Keeping Faith has just won itself a nationwide BBC1 airing for later in the summer, thanks largely to Eve Myles (it is, in fairness, my favourite role of hers that I've seen), Hidden doesn't have any well-known names to draw in the viewers.

It is excellent, though – a crime drama with a twist, and the twist is that we the audience know from the start whodunit, as the show follows the story of both the investigating officers (Sian Reese-Williams is excellent as world-weary DI Cadi John) and the creepy, pathetic, dangerous, yet in some ways almost childlike Dylan Harris and his twisted little family in the woods (Rhodri Meilir is the standout of the show, for me). Plus two more seemingly unrelated sub-plots, which take a few episodes to begin to merge with the main storyline – this isn't the story of a police investigation, this is a very human story about people. Investigator, villain, victim: everyone has a story, and those stories don't begin in the moment of crisis.

So the central mystery of the show isn't whodunit, but rather what exactly happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? And, crucially, can the next one be saved? Watching Dylan's story progress alongside that of the police investigation, waiting for his path to cross with those of the potential new victims…it really ramps up the tension, because we know what the police don't, we get to see Dylan spiralling, are allowed insight into his home life and mind-set to see the pressures he is under, we know that this is a race against time before more people get hurt – but will the police be able to put the pieces together in time?

I'm four episodes in and absolutely loving it – I'd previously recorded Craith but never quite got round to watching it, but now I'm so gripped by Hidden and its slowly converging sub-plots that I might have to just binge the last four episodes in Welsh rather than wait for them to air on BBC Wales, I'm so anxious to know what happens next!

Also, I've seen a lot of Welsh dramas set in the south and west, but Craith/Hidden is set and filmed up north, around Snowdonia, so the Welsh is a different dialect and accent than I'm used to, which I'm really enjoying, plus the scenery and cinematography is beautiful. So go forth, UK people, and check it out!

The other new show I've really enjoyed recently was Bulletproof on Sky One, created by and starring Noel Clarke and Ashley Walters – in general style and tone it felt like nothing so much as a modern version of The Professionals, and was loads of fun to watch, a proper buddy-cop drama in the finest tradition. I'm a little annoyed that a prominent female character got fridged in the final episode, purely so that one of the male leads could be sad about it for five minutes, but that's really my only complaint, other than its being a little rough around the edges in places (and it is hardly alone in that). I found the series as a whole really entertaining, full of both humour and drama, and it is clear that a lot of thought and care went into making it as diverse as possible in multiple ways. It has humour and it has heart, so again, if you get the chance to check it out, folks, please do!

In other news, my Big Sis has recently invested in a holiday lodge at Manorbier (near Tenby) in Pembrokeshire so earlier this month the whole family descended on the place for our annual holiday get-together. It is a beautiful place, rural enough to be really peaceful yet also close to enough leisure and sightseeing attractions to keep holiday-makers busy for weeks, never mind just a few days! Beaches, castles, gardens, theme parks – Pembrokeshire has them all!

(  Picspam behind the cut  )

In other, other news this is what my garden looked like at the beginning of March, when the Beast from the East hit:

Pretty impressive overnight snowfall for this temperate coastal climate! The university where I work actually closed due to the snow, first time in its history (and my first ever snow day).

And this is my garden in April, looking a lot greener, first signs of spring, but still pretty ratty - a mild winter followed by late snowfall was not kind to a lot of my plants.


So I decided that the time was right to begin to set in motion a plan I'd been cooking up all winter, to extend the herbaceous border and thus shrink the lawn. This turned out to be a rather more difficult undertaking than I originally expected, because once I started digging, I found – well, this:


So now at last I understand why my lawn is always so rubbish! Because it is growing out of about half an inch of topsoil thinly laid over a great heap of rubble! Seriously, this is how much rubble I dug out of just one little strip up the side of the lawn:


Half bricks, broken paving slabs, shards of glass – you name it, I found it, less than an inch below the surface. Worth all the hard digging in the end, though – this is the first strip, freshly dug and ready for planting, back in April:


Planting and seeding commenced:


And the digging continued!


New plants and seeds went in – I am extremely grateful to the Pound Shop in town for so regularly stocking a really lovely range of plants, which I've found to be both beautiful and healthy if you manage to pick them up on the day they hit the shelf (by far the cheapest option for planting a new bed).


So that was May. Fast forward a few weeks to the beginning of July...and the garden is now a sea of flowers, bees and butterflies! Ignore the lawn, the lawn is horrible, thanks to the heatwave and the fact that it is growing out of only about an inch of soil over a layer of rubble, but the flower beds are just bursting with life – I'm really pleased with how it is coming along!




When I first moved in, almost five years ago now, this was just patchy overgrown scrub grass and mud - not a bad transformation, no?

Isn't it lovely to feel that spring is properly here now? I spent most of Saturday with my Mum at the RHS Flower Show here in Cardiff, where we met this chap:

And I bought a bunch of lovely new plants:

Here we have a fritillaria (bought to console me for my little snake's head fritillary, which got munched by slugs before it could flower this year), a phlox, a thrift, a viola, muscari, a couple of anemones and a clematis majojo, which I bought because: majojo.

Also, the castle was looking rather lovely in the spring sunshine:


My cats are certainly enjoying getting out in the sun!


Since the weather has been so lovely lately, I've been getting out and about a bit more. I went the other week for a hike up to the Caerau Hillfort up at the top end of Ely. It's an ancient Iron Age site - the earthworks are now covered by trees, but there's been a lot of archaeology going on up there in recent years to discover the extent of the settlement. This is what it looks like from the air (not my photo, obviously):

There isn't a lot to see on foot - just a very flat hill top with some cows grazing, but at the north-eastern end of the site stands the ruins of a medieval church, St Mary's

Alongside a small ringwork that is believed to be the site of a castle, probably contemporary with the church


On a clear day you can see right across the city from the edge of the ringwork - not pictured 'cause it was really misty the day I was there, but its easy to see what a strong, defensible position it was, back in the day.

Eslam and Yasmin, the kids from upstairs, came down the fire escape and played in my garden yesterday for the first time in the 8 months I've been living in this flat.

I didn't mind. I always knew they had access to the garden, I'm only surprised they haven't made use of it before now, and they weren't doing any harm, messing about doing roly-polies and hand-stands and having tickle fights on the lawn.

They are moving out, apparently, probably within the next 3 weeks - Samar told me once that she didn't trust the fire escape, but perhaps she's loosened up on that now that they are leaving.

I just hope whoever moves in after them doesn't want to share the garden too much!

In other news, I now live in the kind of community where the elderly chap next door will bring home a few shoots of mint from his allotment and give them to me for my garden - and throw in a few sticks of rhubarb while he's at it, just because.

So this is suburbia.

I was recently reminded by galathea_snb that I never have posted any pics of my new flat, so, for Chris (and anyone else who may be interested), here's a picspam.

( Cut to spare your f-lists )