This year in the yard.

My first view of what would be the Night Planted Orchard was not auspicious. The front yard was an expanse of dirty, crunchy gravel designed to park multiple vans and protect them from marauding brigands. There was not a living thing in sight. Within a few weeks the decrepit fences had mysteriously fallen down, all on one windless day.

From its position, we guessed that the yard would get little light. We decided to plant a Tombstone Rose to soften the Stalinesque front and hide the miss-matched brickwork in the extension. As we repaired the fences we removed several large pieces of concrete which had to lie where they wished. We planted a few herbs around them, scattered some seeds and left it to its own devices while we coaxed the Night Planted Orchard from its long sleep. We were wrong about the light, and under the gravel is fen soil, rich and unused. Water drains through the yard and because there is a steep drop on one side, it doesn't hang around, but it's not completely arid either. The weeds that sprang up in the first year should have been a clue.

The Tombstone Rose established itself in a season. Perhaps its closeness to the lair of the Water Spirit has something to do with that and now it smothers one wall with relish. I have to prune it three times a year to keep it going onwards and upwards. I could say that the rest of the planting was slow to establish. But that would be stealing credit. The yard self-seeds like nothing on Earth. Indeed, sometimes I think tiny plants rain down from heaven when we're not looking and establish themselves overnight.

Over the years this self-perpetuating garden has grown like a child that you meet once a year. One year it's tiny and inconspicous. The next it's feisty and running around. The next time you see him he's filled out and is a rugby player. So it is this year in the yard. Amongst the ferment, a couple of pretty little silver birches set themselves in altogether inappropriate locations. We decided to move them to somewhere more fitting. So it was that I found myself sitting among the growing gravel garden, trying to persuade roots out from under the garage. The Hunter came snuffling about and was surprised to find me hiding among the plants.

Hiding.

I realised with a certain amount of shock that the plants had spread enough in height and width to provide me with a hiding place. I am not a small person. What's more it had integrated itself into some coherent whole. It had 'clicked'. I was surrounded with lavender, rosemary and a stray buddlea. Thyme crunched under my hands. Poppy heads caught my eye as I sat and the tall spires of Salvia spread all around me. In the heat the scent was strong and muscular, a genuine herbal immersion. California Poppies line one wall. Welsh poppies brought from our old garden flourish. A couple of nigella have popped up by the water butt. Grannies bonnets nod everywhere. The banksia is now in full flower, a solid wall of tiny cream blooms. it occurs to me that we have never had a garden where plants self-set so abundantly and in series, year after year. My usual experience is that one year's planting brings a second, smaller flush the next. Here each year doubles the number of plants. The self-setters don't creep, they detonate.  Lady Snoutingdingle resolutely pulls up all the forget-me-nots when they finish every spring and every year they come back. Even the winter flowering jasmine, a plant I see in my mind's eye as a tangle of ugly bald branches for most of the year, looks lush and comfy against every wall. We have two pots of sedums and even they have self-set in the gravel, spreading like a lime-green foam. I laid back among the herbs and let the Hunter snuffle sloppily at my chin. Content. 

When I returned to the house, Lady Snoutingdingle sniffed my herb-washed jacket and said that she was inspired to make pizza. The Hunter wagged his approval.

The Bashful Demoiselle

Our Cornish hideaway has acres of immaculate grounds, including some fast flowing streams left mostly to nature. I'd hoped to photograph a Silver Washed Fritillary but a kerfuffle high in the trees distracted me. A squirrel, ever hopeful, flushed a pair of tawny owls from hiding - or perhaps it was the other way around. I followed them into the trees, looked up and saw a beautiful demoiselle perched in the sun on a chestnut leaf. It was an immature male, its wings still coppery but its body was the same metallic blue.

The Night Planted Orchard is home to a few Banded Demoiselles, which I consider to be our most beautiful native creature. They prefer the slow, sluggish waters of The Fens. The Beautiful Demoiselle, on the other hand, prefers faster flowing waters, preferably with few nutrients. It's always nice to set eyes on a new creature, especially one as beautiful as this.

Velvet Snoutindingle's Old Nut Sack

Roger will not be rushed. If you try, for example, to give the Night Planted Orchard a quick mow because of rain followed by warm sun and you are about to leave for two weeks well earned rest, he will not co-operate.

It's my own fault. On removing Roger from his shed I discovered an old nut lying in the grass. It was worn and rusty and could have lain there for years. I should have known. I put the nut on a shelf and proceeded to mow the top half of the garden which is not an orchard. Yet. There were no incidents other than the usual blocked chute due to a particularly thick blade of grass, or forgetting that mowing in reverse causes Roger to sulk. No wheels fell off. There were no punctures. Roger even ran healthily and filled two baskets of cuttings. I took the nut off the shelf and threw it into the little sack of old nuts in the garage. 

The next morning I decided to finish the orchard with a hard deadline before leaving for Cornwall. A long journey and not one that could be sensibly delayed. I had not reckoned on the power of dirt, rust and years of accreted grass clippings to do the work of a well tightened nut. At the very furthest point of the orchard Roger's steering failed. A simple connection which needed a nut curiously like the one I'd found the day before was waving uselessly between two wheels, previously inseparable, now sulking and staring in opposite directions. I searched my nut sack for almost an hour and couldn't find it. None of the others fitted. Perhaps it was a curious Canadian nut somewhere between metric and imperial. As I struggled to drag Roger back to his shed, one of the rear tyres went flat and refused to stay inflated for more than a few minutes. Between draggings and pumpings, I noticed that the temporary front wheel was behaving oddly. The original wheel was away being repaired - it takes me hours to replace an inner tube with my rebellious hands - and I'd replaced it with an old one. Silly me. As I investigated the centre portion with the bearing which connected to the axle neatly popped free of its wheel and fell useless in the grass.

Poor Roger will spend May under a tarp, with a sorry list to starboard and sorely exposed to the elements. I hope he learns his lesson.

Hunter

When he was small, he disdained petting and wasn't even too keen on being brushed or fussed. Clipping his claws takes a staff of four and we've given up. But now, he stands still to have his claws filed down because, as one of his vetinary team - yes really - observed, his long side claws are causing him pain in his joints. So now he allows us to file those down and he's come to like it. In fact, I do believe he's starting to demand it. Sometimes we put heat onto his joints and he's come to ask for that now. But sometimes when he visits the vet he cries out in pain, something that he's never done before.

For a long time he's come to sleep against me if I lie on the floor. Unfortunately I have arthritis too, and so I don't often do that these days. It's become a standing joke that his treatment is better than mine. He has hydrotherapy, doggy physio, laser therapy and high end arthritis drugs that the NHS wont give me. Not that I'm jealous, you understand. I can articulate my pain and find strategic pathways around it - or so I'm told. He can't, and that's true. He can't understand and if a squirrel must be expelled from the Night Planted Orchard then sobeit and hang the consequences.

It troubles me that I don't know what he thinks about these things. I have often suspected that he sees the winter as some kind of punishment that god-like humans have visited on him. He certainly does recognise the spring in some way and even comes and waits by the lounge doors, which never opens in wintertime, instead of taking the long walk through kitchen and conservatory. He loves the spring warmth and the chance to roll in the grass while it's spiky and the ants aren't yet running. So I often wonder what he thinks about pain, if he thinks about it at all. We can certainly take it away in some circumstances and I sincerely hope that he doesn't believe that we've brought it on him.

He has hip end elbow dysplasia. A finding that devastated his breeders, who are the antithesis of puppy farmers so much that they stopped breeding labs thereafter. But even in the best lines, where hard work has been done to eliminate these problems, they still crop up from time to time, as with any dog.

All of this is not to say that he's decrepit or miserable. He's fit. He loves to swim. Occasionally a new vet will tut at us that he's a kilo overweight but he's probably the leanest lab I know, at least for his age. He still runs. We've even been told that stopping him jumping ever, with the best intentions, is probably too much and his exercises now put strain on his back legs. He's also smart as a whip. Not collie-smart, but he has the cunning of a fox. He will play games with us and he knows when we're going to do something he doesn't like. He's even learned - from me - to pretend that there is a squirrel or a cat in the garden.

He's also a particular character. He's not dominant, but loves to play with other dogs. Even as he slows down, we have to stop him being too full on with other dogs. He is a big boy, after all, and still packs a playful punch. He's not fully confident and when a stray Rottie wandered into the garden, lovely as it was, he hid under the stairs. He is, however, the declared mortal enemy of snails and slugs - squirrels - cats - hedgehogs.

Orion, descending

I watched the hunter trot toward the back gate and I realised that he was walking like an old dog. It's hard to describe exactly what has changed, but he's slower to start moving. He no longer springs into action. His muzzle is white underneath now and those pale hairs creep up the sides of his face. He noticeably pants from pain, from time to time and his hips sometimes click as he walks. When Lady Snoutingdingle walks him, he will often stop or slow down. When I walk him, he carries dogfully on, hiding any discomfort from me. I'm learning to tell the difference.