Inspiration and installation...

I spent this weekend over at my mums. It was a lovely break from the constant stream of goings on at The Keep and an inspiring one at that. We spent most of Sunday having a tea and cake filled snoop around other peoples fabulous gardens thanks to the 'open garden' events that the NGS organisation put on. They are charitable events and you basically turn up on the doorstep of the advertised addresses, pay a few quid to step through the gate and off you potter around someone else's back yard creation - genius really.

Having, rather ashamedly, never done it before I wasn't sure what to expect, but got a genuinely pleasant surprise. In a way it takes quite a lot to open your garden to complete strangers - it would for me anyway, I'd worry about the critics who'd want to comment on what I was getting wrong... - but these gardens were just amazing. Truly, they were... well maybe the pictures show you a little of what I'm gushing about.

One particular garden was how I always imagined 'the secret garden' to be - lots of little nooks and crannies and hidden bits that just had to be discovered. Another was a continuous festival of smells, it was like the owner had made it their mission to give you a different scent at every turn. Roses flowed into honeysuckle then into lilies, nothing overpowering it's neighbour, just complimenting each other perfectly. Then there was a vegetable patch Monty Don himself would have envied... The whole event was a feast of inspiration and started ordering I seeds as soon as I got internet connection again.

While I whiled away my weekend taking note of every flower, fruit and fern that caught my eye, D kept the ship sailing back home and I returned to a house that now has rooms I hardly recognise. A stunning new fireplace now sits proudly in what will be our living room, complete with an aged sleeper mantle and space for a little log burner. Our Bathroom, having been re-plastered, has it's brand new suite waiting to be installed. We now only have one room left to strip and skim before the whole house has been taken back to the brick and made good. At one point last week you could stand on the earth that was beneath the old kitchen floor and look all the way up, through the holes in the floors and ceilings right into the rafters of the roof. The Keep has no secrets from us, we've seen it's bare bones. Moving in has become an idea based firmly in reality now rather than in pipe dreams and I get butterflies just imagining it.

So, I've promised myself that, when we are fully established, when I've got the garden the way I want it, OK maybe not fully matured but a clear, beautiful work in progress, I'm going to make cake by the shed load, put a £2.50 entry fee on my gate and invite strangers round to have a look at what we came up with! Just because maybe someone like me will pop round, they'll ooh and arrrr at the flowers and run their fingers over the leaves and take from my garden something they might imagine in their own.

Inspire others to install something beautiful on their own little patch... I like that idea.

Come rain or shine, it'll still be mine (really soon too!)

G