1   Our Lady Betty Balfour Clematis, which is supposed to flower in September, has given us two beautiful blooms already.

Lady Betty Balfour

2    We have had a beautiful new slate terrace laid very expertly and are delighted with it. Now we just have to re-plant up the wall and the border.

New terrace

3   We are going out this evening to celebrate the Summer Solstice with our friends, N,G&T, who have the new woodland. I found this beautiful poem by Roselle Angwin which I really like and which suits tonight just perfectly.  Tonight we will be singing and raising hope, friendship and love.

poem for the summer solstice

Lanes on the cusp of honeysuckle and dog-rose,
ash and oak in their full clothes.

Here where this damselfly alights
on the solar globe of the ox-eye daisy,
where the spells that make rain and wind
and bird-tracks pleach the air –

again and again we sing the sun back up,
spin summer-short moonlight into our hair;
again and again in this circle of days and nights
against loss, decay, death, we raise hope, friendship, love.

Brief lives; but the stuff of which we’re made
is starfire and water – everything holds our trace.

~ Roselle Angwin © 2012