After tea (or dinner, the main evening meal) I rushed into the garden and garnered the dregs of my energy to make these 2 quick sketches. About an hour and half's work I managed (listening to The News Quiz, The Archers and Front Row) before I began to get cold and tiredness caught up with me.
Mom's always buying plants then, when a few weeks (days sometimes) later they start to wilt they get transported outside. These are the remains of a hyacinth (actually I bought that one for Mum) and a rose. The third (on the right) are my 'tete-a-tete' daffs, which I will eventually get round to planting in the garden for next year. Whenever I hear the phrase 'tete-a-tete' I always think of Jane Austen. I can't remember which novel it was (it may have been Pride and Prejudice) but it was definiely in an Austen novel that I first encountered this phrase, and it was a very long time ago!
After those dead plants I made this quick sketch of the top of our garden (I was a day ahead of myself when I dated it you see). The sun was setting and catching the edges of the new leaves coming on our old apple tree (on the right) and the dead leaves still clinging to the branches of our poplar tree (middle). Everything's starting to come into bloom now and it makes me happy to see it and sad too. Sad because of the losses of recent (and more distant) years, sad because of how time 'like an ever rolling stream' has played a trick on me. I've blinked and half my life has gone.
I had to Google the fragment by Isaac Watts by the way, I remember it from a Divine Comedy song, but my fragile memory lost more than it remembered.
