I realise a couple of weeks have passed since I last wrote; it’s Monday evening, at the end of a quiet Bank Holiday, and I’m on the late train back up to London as I’ve got an early start in the morning. Do you know that funny feeling you get, after three days off, when you can’t quite remember the small details of what happened in the last two weeks? Work has been pretty intense, with some big deadlines. But they were all delivered, and this Friday, Charlie and I are off on holiday for a week. Destination Mexico. You may think it’s a strange thing to leave England quite when she is at her most beautiful, but it’s going to be good to get away, and we can’t wait.
The interesting thing is looking at the garden at this time of year, and how much it shifts in just a week. These photos were taken last weekend. The iris were just beginning to unfurl. Now they are in full flow. When we are back, they will be gone. Gardening is a transient art.
Henry eating grass and Mavis having a lie on the terrace. The sharp-eyed will note Charlie’s dahlia border beginning to get going…
There isn’t much that could be as soothing as this view at the end of a long week. 
It really is Iris time. Charlie planted 200 tubers last autumn.
O N E W E E K L A T E R
One week passes and here is the garden on a brilliantly sunny evening, last Thursday. The foxgloves are at peak, the aquilegia has self-seeded like a mad thing, and Charlie’s iris border is unfurling by the hour (almost literally).
It’s a happy and completely unplanned coincidence that at the precise moment the irises are out, the sun settles perfectly to shine on them through the gap of the garden gate. 
I had a quick trip to the Isle of Wight to see Mum and Dad, and help them with a few things – and with their imminent move after 25 years, which is daunting and exciting in equal measure. Back home on Saturday evening. The rest of the weekend was grey, damp and misty, which was rather beautiful, and made the intense green of late May, tipping into June, all the more saturated.
We had friends over this morning and went for a wander around the lake and the village. I should say that we have had a few new adventures in the last couple of weeks – not least, the sensational Vanessa Bell exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery that ends in a week – but they weren’t recorded in a photograph, I’m afraid. But quite nice for once, perhaps, to have a blog that treads a very familiar path. 
This afternoon, after heavy rain, mist came down with a vengeance. The valley was silent and warm, the garden drenched, and the air dripping.
Amongst all this peace and quiet, of course, it has been a week of grim news, and of utter senselessness, in which lives have been altered and dreams have been shattered, to no end and for no reason. Prayers of hope to those who need them.
