I had brought out a red currant plant which needed to go into the soft fruit orchard first.  Luckily my ground was prepared. I had laboriously built up the ground last year in covering this part of the garden with mulch, weeds, and weedproof fabric.

The result is some rather lovely soil, weed free and ready for plants.  I have a dozen or so cuttings that are sulking in the potting shed that could go here, but I need more redcurrants.  The main plant I have is sad and dare I say it, ailing.  So replacements welcome.

I added a few dozen extra crocosmia corms – mostly Emily McKenzies – as this is going to be a vibrant bed in the future.  Once the fruit is over there is very little happening in this huge part of the vegetable garden.  So if the rest of the crocosmias have survived the freeze it might be a colourful treat.

My best treat was the arrival of Artur early in the morning.  And for once he didn’t go through his two day sulk. Instead he purred and yowled and paid me a lot of attention all day.

I have brought out a new rain gauge to replace my lovely one from Australia which suffered in the cold.  This Rainex one promises to cope with all weathers. Polycarbonate and UV, all the bells and whistles.

I dared to go into my potting shed (which is a tip) to retrieve some tools to get started on the main task of the day.  Sowing.  I hoed the top left quadrant of the potager and then set to with the tape measure.

I am designing a swoosh of leeks in each bed, and a central area for beans.  So I set up my poles and placed the central square and then worked outwards from there.  Two long rows of peas, four smaller rows of broad beans.  It took hours, but with the blazing sun (sunhat required) it was a delight.

And Artur helped.  He managed to roll in most of the beds I carefully hoed and cleared.   I’ve sowed seeds, and then added an extra layer of compost, followed by a top layer of cheap mulch.  These beds never get enough manure or food.  So I have taken to selectively feeding each row of seeds with this extra mulch and compost.  That way I’m not feeding between the rows with necessary goodness.  The weeds are bad enough as it is.

It all looks a bit complicated right now.  But I need to keep the deer off, and stop Artur from rolling all over the young plants. So it’s cloches and sharp sticks all the way.

I had some bags of the mulch left over. It’s very cheap and cheerful.  But it does a good job of suppressing some of the weeds.

So I thought it a good idea to cover the wide path that has been created since the building of the new potager wall.

Right now it’s a beautiful blank canvas.  I had first thought to plant a hornbean hedge along here. And I may still do so.  But this year I thought it might be fun to sow and plant all the potager flowers along this long axis.  I usually rely on self sown cosmos, but I wonder if they are alive after this cold winter.  Will I be forced to sow them again? Perish the thought. If you look back over my summer vegetable garden you will know that this is a veritable cosmos forest in August.  I shall wait and see what germinates this month before I commit.

And then in the late afternoon I braved the potting shed.  I have to sort through all the stored plants and see what is alive.  I can tell that I’ve lost of my bupleurum plants, and much more.  But I can barely get in the door for clutter. So out came plants and I started to try and create a bit of order.

I have 27 lavender grosso plants.  They are to go (I think) in the new bed I’m planning in front of the house.  But that’s the tyranny of this huge long garden.  Anywhere else and you would say 27 plants – marvellous.  But here they look puny. I will need 33 more just to fill the area I had planned. Goodness only knows where I’m going to get that many plants (and cheaply).  Maybe I’ll just do half the area properly now and then work on the rest of the area another time.

But what am I doing thinking of yet another bed of flowers and shrubs? There are crops to sow, the top vegetable bed to weed, a whole huge potager to cover in mulch, ornamental grasses to move and cut back, sticks to chip for a more permanent mulch.  Oh, and 30 of the thyme plants to get into position on the last new landscaped bed in front of this terrace.

Sleep? No time for that.

Don’t you just love how easier it is to get up early when there are fun things to do? It’s Wednesday, it’s sunny and I’m raring to go.

Well, it’s only 3C out there and I’m still in front of the roaring fire, but I am doing the list.  That’s the best bit.  The list runs to a whole page and starts with sowing broad beans and peas.  But it won’t be a quick plonk em in the ground. I’m doing a rather scary redesign of the potager beds to give them more appeal.

When I left last month, I sowed seeds and put out the potatoes for chitting and left them in front of the huge picture window in the living room. The lettuce and cabbage have sprouted well; so too the shallots.  But the penstemons, stubbornly refuse to germinate.

I’ve done some reading and they are supposed to be started off at 4C. Which I have done. But we shall see if they can cope with the potting shed. They move there tomorow.

But for all of you wondering how it went, the good news is that the pipes didn’t burst when I came back yesterday and turned the water back on.  What a relief.  This is the first time the mountain had frozen and along with it, the water pipes.  But with a careful turn of the mighty levers in the box in the ground outside the guest house, the magic water flowed.  How magic? Try living with flushing loos without water for a few days. It makes driving over to the village square to the communal (and always running water) trough  and filling with jerry cans a very contemplative task.

There was a mighty spluttering and a gurgling in the taps, but that’s fine. I just have to check the washing machine today and then call it safe.

So on with outdoor news.  I can see a lot of damage from this three weeks of very cold weather.  The rosemary has a lot of burnt tips and I think I can see some very damaged cistus plants. I’ll do a good lap first thing this morning and take pictures and observe.

I’m counting down the days before I get the chance to go back out into the garden.  But in the meantime I thought you might like to see what I get up to in the London part of my life.  Well, there’s research work. Paid. And research work. Passion.

And that will be gardening.  So here are a few images of the tomes I have borrowed from the many libraries I belong to here in the capital.

I cling on to my Westminster library card as they have a very active book buying policy. And there’s very little that dates faster than the visual imagery in garden books.  Well, if you’ve ever found a cookbook from the 1980s you will know what I mean.  Fashion is rife even in gardening and cooking.

From there I borrowed the much yearned for Resilient Garden. Why? Because the author gardened in both Australia and Britain, and I thought I had an affinity, not to mention affiliation with the plants she would probably write about.

Was I disappointed? Well, it could have done with an editor.  It started well, but I found so much of the information vague and untested.  And then there’s that fantastic moment of envy when you realise that she bought huge gardens that had already been beautifully designed and well maintained.  And then there is just the usual Staff Envy.  But that’s churlish. I did find some nuggets of information in the book, and will study my notes later.

My closest library – just a few hundred metres from home is sadly the smallest. But it was pleasing to find some books I borrowed almost five years ago:  The Book of Garden Plans and Carol Klein’s Grow Your Own Garden.

I may be imagining it, but I think I was the only person who borrowed Klein’s wonderful book. I guess there isn’t much call for propagating penstemon plants or taking basal cuttings of phlox in central London.

And I only borrowed the Garden Plans book because I remembered a wonderful design group who did lovely big country gardens: Acres Wild.

But re-reading them was like meeting myself as a frantic and voracious but directionless gardener.  I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Apart from wanting what I saw. Without knowing what I had or how I could grow them.  There is no way you can say to someone starting out ‘wait, wait and see’. You are so desperate to get started.

I am much more aware of garden magazines as just pretties. Impossibly beautiful gardens that are static moments in a garden’s life.  And hard to emulate unless they are exactly the same as your own.

It’s a shame that Oudolf does not garden in Mediterranean climates. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to mass plant those fantastic huge colourful swathes that have everyone swooning.  The Oudolf book was a christmas present. And it’s fun to see how one of Europe’s greatest designers prepares his projects.  But apart from some grasses, I can only look on the page and enjoy them for what they are.  Garden fancies.

You could say the same for Penelope Hobhouse. Her sumptuous designs are all done on mighty grand scales, on very flat gardens, with huge budgets and very compliant clients.  But I saw this book and thought I would borrow it again from another branch of Camden libraries.  And discovered to my suprise that it was actually for sale. For one pound.  Has knowledge ever come so cheap?  I will enjoy reading it just to get some ideas and study her planting schemes for her big Italian projects.  At least they are closer to the Ardeche reality than moist, high rainfall gardens in Holland and Denmark.

So with all this circling about and having fun; there was one book that would suit. But it took a bit of searching.  The internet is the perfect place to browse the library catalogues.  And I tracked down Louisa Jones’ biography (well, garden biography) of Nicole de Vesian at the Royal Horticultural Society’s library at Vincent Square.

The library (heaven on earth) was damaged in a fire last year and is still yet to open. Apparently it wasn’t the fire that did the most damage, but the water sprinklers that came on automatically to stop the fire.  And ruined so many books.  They have been restoring like mad and hope to open in summer.  But in the meantime you order online, email the librarian, name your date and scuttle to the huge Society’s door and get handed your books in plastic bags. It’s all madly furtrive. But when you can walk back home with such treasure, it’s worth the effort.

Nicole de Vesian was first of all a fashion designer, and only took up gardening in her 60s.  She became a formidable gardener who created a jewel of a garden in the Luberon in the south of France.

Positively next door!  Well, hotter in summer and less cold in winter; but I’ve loved the images of the garden that I had seen in books and magazines and wanted to learn more.

I can’t say I have. The book is baffling and very thin on text, but the pictures are sumptuous and full of ideas.  And she gardened on terraces; something I understand and very few people do.

I’m battling with ideas right now about how to design my little narrow terraces up near the shade garden into a more homogeneous whole.  And looking at an image from the Resilient Garden gave me an idea.  It was a photo of a beautifully planted bed full of grasses, verbenas, perovskias and such,  but it was the image of three discreet box balls planted at an angle almost out of shot that struck me.  And brave de Vesian has enforced the idea that box balls need not be boring.

I have to wait until research funds come into my account before I get the chance to go shopping. And then it will be just the dread investment of yet more box balls.  But don’t worry, I’m not going over to the topiary dark side.  But I just love the idea of evergreen plants.  I can’t manage huge gardens that are just deserts of dead plants in winter.  I am outdoors all year round and love having something to look at.

I have no idea if my current evergreen plants have survived this hard, hard winter.  I will find out to my horror on Tuesday no doubt.  So I shan’t make a big plant investment until I see the ones I have huddling but alive from the coldest February in decades.

I’ve just given in. There’s no point hiding.  So despite it being a nippy minus 10C outside, I decided to do a spot of gardening. Thick puffa jacket, hat with flaps, heavy duty gloves, gritted teeth and off I went.

I have been looking at my calender and I realised that I will be away for the rest of the month.  And if things heat up then I will be so far behind that the winter chores will have to give way to the spring chores.  And there won’t be enough hours in the day to get it all done.

So out came the secateurs and all the eragrostis grasses got their haircut.  They are tough plants and they will just have to tough out another hard cold week of very cold weather.

I did the ones in the calabert garden and then the dozens on the steep bank. Aided and abetted by one elderly Artur who thought it great fun to play with the huge long grass fronds.  Actually the poor vole didn’t think him so elderly when he stalked, caught and ate him earlier. I will spare you a photo of that rather gruesome morning sport.  But it did mean he was happy to follow me about the garden and not beg for food.

Annoyingly, he has settled into the potting shed in his favourite box this afternoon. So the door is open just enough for him to get out.  And for very cold air to come in and attack my poor plants.  Cats versus plants. A dilemma. I just have to remember to bundle up later and go up and see if he’s still there.

Jean Daniel has been away for the weekend (I was on horse feeding duty) so maybe if there’s a prospect of a warmish fire in the kitchen at his own home he might slink off and I can shut the door.

These aren’t really gardening reflections. But still, it did consume a bit of my day.

The other big job for the day was to prune the huge vines in the courtyard that we use as shade cover for our oak table.  That definitely had to be done now as they bleed when the sap rises and it’s a very distressing sight.

The whole job took about an hour and I had to come in and reheat with tea half way through.

And that was about the sum of the day.  Loads of wood carried in to both fires. A spot of rugby to watch on tv, a trip down to the train station and back… And suddenly it’s night. And the temperature is dropping again.

Outside it is blowing a gale and the thermometer reads minus 10 Celsius. Ouch. so no gardening outdoors for me today.  Well, if I’m very keen I might go up and drag down branches for chipping.  But we had more snow overnight; so things might be a bit buried.

I’ve cleaned the basement, put out the potatoes for chitting.  Belle de Fontenay and Charlotte. And I’m about to start sorting out all my seeds.  But first I must go and feed the fire next door.

It’s the first time in years that we’ve had to keep heat on constantly in the guest house.  If the temperature falls below 0C indoors the pipes will crack.  So there’s no shirking feeding the fire.