China Girl blog 23rd May 2019

It is said that you make your own luck. Creating a garden with someone you love is one of life’s great pleasures. Mother says you don’t realise how lucky you are until the years have slid away, like whispers from the past.

I think perhaps it could be as much as ten years since the round pond started leaking and the fountain no longer worked. Mother had no intention of sorting the decay; she shut her eyes as she walked past the poor fountain, thinking “perhaps next year I will have it seen to” or “maybe Cothay will be lucky enough to be chosen again for a film.” That is until Tim, whilst treating the house for clothes moths, murmured “such a pity, the empty pond spoils the garden. I know a good builder who would sort it out.” That was it! The builder arrived, Ma winced and said “ok, go ahead.” Within ten days the pond had been tanked and the fountain mended; the spray now reaching twenty feet, falling onto the clear, clean water in the pond. All this galvanised Mother to lay the stone slabs, which the film company from last year had left behind. They are now placed like a picture frame around the pond, and the old olive trees waiting to be bedded into the gravel with sand.

The Canada geese and their three babies who were hatched on the island in the lake have gone; perhaps the parents have taken them to the river. Two new visitors to the lake have taken up residence, a glorious pair kingfishers!

The glorious yellow welsh poppies, Meconopsis cambrica, their petals like spun silk, have seeded in great drifts in the Inner Court, moving gently with the breeze, bending this way and that as if chatting to each other.

How lovely are these golden days, and how lucky are we who live and work here, far from the madding crowds.