Nature eh? Turn your back for mere moments and the sly old fox is busy reclaiming your immaculately manicured garden. The summer has been somewhat dubious, so it’s taken until now for me to face up to the fact that something must be done. Secateurs in hand I set about cutting down a year’s worth of shameful neglect. Here’s a recap…

June 2010: This is my garden just after I got the keys to my house, two years ago. Where I live is, I think, the site of an old quarry. My garden rises up, up, up behind the house, so that you can stand by that fence at the back and look over the roof. It’s cute, the house set in a hobbity hollow, but maintaining the garden is pure hell.

Aug 2010: A couple of months later it had ‘blossomed’ into this. Sort of wild and romantic in the sunshine, but it’s a fine line between free-form gardening and ‘do you think she’s died?’

Sept 2012: Oh, garden shame. This is it now, and this is after quite a bit of cutting back. The lawn is now a rustic mix of moss and dandelions, the plum tree is choked with ivy and those shrubs are blocking out the sun.

* Cat shown, as always, to illustrate scale

Somewhere under these piles of stuff are the secateurs. This is a Real Reveal as cautionary tale. Don’t leave your garden for a whole year. It’s bigger than you, and clearing it up again will bring you face to face with what it means to be a puny human pitted against the force of nature. For a view of a really lovely garden – and an illustration of the difference between My Friend and myself – here is her recent Real Garden Reveal.

Squint launches wallpaper

Beautiful, joyful new wallpaper from the mighty Squint, AKA Lisa Whatmough (and team), who first created waves with her unique, and much copied, patchwork upholstered furniture. Am mentally tearing down the wallpaper in my bathroom to make way for this, The Peacock. Love that wasabi green. There are five more prints available just now, all […]

Smashed it

A lot of bloggers find blogging about the things, good and bad, that have happened in their lives therapeutic. We haven’t really used MFH that way until now, but this weekend I opened a cupboard and the lid of a very nice tureen fell out and smashed on the floor. [Enraged face] Rats. I bought […]

Bum note

Any thoughts welcome but I don’t feel I need to say anything more.

Lockerz for linens

There’s an awkward bit in my house that is also the best place for a linen chest – something I needed after my previous one became a wardrobe for my daughter last year. It’s the upstairs landing, just outside the bathroom. I’ve tried to capture its shapely appeal here . Those angles. Finding a rug […]