Spring Flowers

When we decided to rent a cottage in Harrowbarrow for Bill's sabbatical, we didn't realize we were moving to an area that is informally known as the daffodil capital of England.  The Tamar Valley is famous for its daffodils and strawberries (the latter bear fruit for over four months starting in May).  As Bill said in an earlier post, it has been an early spring here, which means that we've had more than our fair share of sunshine, spring temperatures, and blooms!  I am really enjoying walking around the village and the valley, and I wanted to share a few pictures with you of the flowers I'm seeing.

Camellias are in bloom now.  We have a shrub outside our back door to the "garden" that is almost 9 feet tall!  It is covered in blooms, which I think look a little bit like roses. 

Grape hyacinths are blooming as well.  These are near our cottage:

There is also a purple flower that grows in mounds that I don't know the name of.  Here it is in the foreground:



Finally, here is a flower we saw all over Cotehele House, in the gardens and mixed with daffodils in floral arrangements in the house.  It is delicate and lovely:

Rhododendrons are popular here.  They usually bloom in late spring, just like in Boone, but here is one at Cotehele that was planted in a sunny spot:

At this point, the snowdrops and croci have stopped blooming.  The cherry trees are flowering, though, and the wild primroses (usually pale yellow) are showing up everywhere.  My favorite spring flower, though, continues to be the daffodil, and every day I see new varieties on my walks.  There are so many different ones to enjoy, and I am treating myself to bunches of them as often as I have a vase to put new ones in.  This week I have them in every room.  This is very fun for me! 

Here's how they are sold in the villages:

That's about $1.60 for a bunch of 12 stems.  I've found them fully open, buds only, and everywhere in between.  All colors and sizes as well. 

People plant them en masse in their gardens

atop village walls

and in the hedges.

Often these hedge plantings look as if someone has thrown the bulbs toward the hedge without taking careful aim!

All over this area there are places that clearly used to be cultivated fields of market daffodils.  This one has had trees planted in it, but the daffodils still come up.

Here is a close up view of the same field.  It is just stunning to see so many daffodils in one place.

Daffodils have been naturalized all over the Cotehele House grounds, like on the hillside in this picture

and in the old orchard.

I'll end with a few of my favorite daffodil pictures.  Enjoy!

And a bonus picture--for those who made it to the end of this post!  No daffodils, just beautiful light.  This was taken last Friday evening on our walk to the Carpenter's Arms for pizza.

Cotehele House

Last Saturday was an absolutely beautiful day, so we decided to take advantage of the weather and visit our local National Trust property, the Cotehele House and Quay (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-cotehele). We joined the National Trust in February so that we could take advantage of all of properties in Cornwall and Devon, but we also wanted to be able to visit Cotehele House whenever we felt like it. In addition to the Tudor house, there is also a quayside on the Tamar River, or landing in American English, that we've been to several times, and acres and acres of pastures and woods that are accessible all of the time. The quayside also has a nice restaurant that serves a great cream tea.

We started our outing by walking to Prospect Tower, which we had seen many times when walking or driving around the area but had never visited. The tower was built in the 1700s, but no one seems to know why it was built. Sometimes it is referred to as the 'Folly' Tower for that reason. Some think that it was built for the visit of King George. Others think that it was a signal tower. Still, it was fun to walk out there on a beautiful day

and climb to the top. The tower reminded us of the story of Rapunzel, especially since the girls had just seen the movie Tangled in December before we came over to England.

The views from the top of the tower are great as you can see here

and here. That's the Calstock Viaduct in the distance, a bridge that I've gone over on the train many times now.

We had some fun taking pictures of the girls from the top. Here's Rebecca,

and Gwendolyn.

Even Christine got in on the action.

Prospect Tower has an interesting triangular shape with concave sides, as you can see here.

We left the tower to walk back to the house, passing some very large and old trees in the pasture.

The house itself is surrounded by gardens, some formal

and some just overgrown with trees and daffodils.

The house itself is very well preserved. Visitors enter the main portion of the house through a courtyard on which the main rooms of the house are centered.

The oldest portion of the house was never upgraded with electricity, so it really feels like an ancient home. The Great Hall is through the main door to the left and the kitchen is off to the right.

The Great Hall is an impressive room with an elaborate fireplace that is continually burning, many suits of armor, and a selection of swords and pikes. All of the rooms also had original furniture in them, and tapestries covered many of the walls. The rooms were also bedecked with many old items such as bowls and silverware. The house even has its own small chapel that can be accessed from the main part of the house. Someone was playing the old organ in there when we visited. One of the bedrooms had a window overlooking the worship area so that residents that were sick could still participate in services. Here is the chapel from the outside.

Most of the rooms are open to viewing, and volunteers in each room answer questions and give visitors interesting tidbits of information. As always, the girls were able to do a hidden treasure hunt in the form of a picture of a detail of something in each of the rooms. Some of the details were difficult to find, but in the end we succeeded. We didn't take any pictures of the inside of the house. I don't know if it is forbidden or not, but we didn't think that they would come out well. Christine and I plan to tour the house again, sans kids, so that we can look at everything in more detail.

The grounds of Cotehele are also fun to explore. We took a path from the house out toward the gardens and orchards. Again, daffodils were blooming everywhere.

The girls loved going through all of the doorways leading to various small gardens.

This one brought us to the formal garden that we showed above,

and this one had a lattice-windowed door in it.

This door in the hedge led to the old orchard.

This old root cellar reminded us of the sod houses that we saw at Laura Ingalls' old homestead properties in Minnesota and South Dakota last summer. We also thought that it looked like a hobbit house - we've just started reading The Hobbit as a family.

We finished up our tour of Cotehele in the orchards where we had a picnic lunch and learned about apples in Cornwall. The National Trust has a nice tour for kids in which they learn about the apple industry. The kids searched for small apple signposts and used a special pen with a speaker to play a recording about that particular site. It was very well done and the kids enjoyed not only finding the signposts, but also hearing the characters tell about a particular apple, or cider, or bees, ... You get the idea. Christine and I liked hearing all of the various accents that were used. This isn't the best picture, but you'll see the pen in Rebecca's hand and can get an idea of what the tour was like. We even ate apples during the tour.

The old orchard is a lovely place, especially now with the carpet of daffodils covering the orchard floor.

We finished our day in the new Mother Orchard. The National Trust recently planted a large orchard in an attempt to reintroduce indigenous apples back to the area. To get people interested in visiting the new orchard, they commissioned Cornish artists to make sculptures related to apples and placed them in the orchard. We really liked the hand holding the apple, which was made of sod.

This sculpture seemed especially fitting in an orchard. Here are the girls for scale.

We also like the willow sculpture of a man and a horse. There was an apple signpost near this sculpture that played a folk story about a man, his horse, and why they needed apple trees. It was a nice tale and was a fitting end to our tour.

This is a lovely place and it's nice to have one of the best-preserved Tudor mansions in England just a couple of miles from our cottage. We'll definitely be visiting Cotehele House and the grounds many times before we leave Cornwall for North Carolina.

Sunny Spring Weekend in Harrowbarrow

Spring has arrived with a vengeance in eastern Cornwall over the past few weeks. Flowers are out in full force (we have a separate post on that). Forget the stereo-type of dreary English weather as we've had more than our fair share of sunny, warm days. I'm sure that we'll get more than our share of rainy weather, as everyone around here keeps saying, but they also talk about what a rough winter it's been this year and I have yet to see winter arrive.

We spent the past weekend enjoying our little village and the sunshine. We spent Saturday at the Cotehele House and Quay (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-cotehele), a National Trust property only two miles from our house. We write about that in another blog posting. We spent the rest of the weekend enjoying our garden and extended property, the village playground, and the girls' new bikes. Yes, you heard correctly, bikes. Our neighbors over the hedge, Graham and Doreen, had spoken with Christine earlier in the week about bikes. Graham was selling his grandson's bike, and Christine had mentioned to him that she was looking for bikes for the girls. When we returned from Cotehele on Saturday, Graham knocked on the door and said that he had found a bike in the nearby village of St. Ive. Christine drove over there with Doreen and returned with a bike for Gwendolyn. Unfortunately, they didn't have a bicycle in Rebecca's size.

Sunday morning was absolutely beautiful and we decided to go to the Harrowbarrow and Metherell village hall's carpark for some space to refresh the girls' biking skills. Here's a picture of Gwendolyn remembering how to ride a bike. She remembered quickly and only had one wreck.

When we returned home later that morning, Graham told us that he and Doreen had found a bicycle for Rebecca at the "tip" or what we call the dump. He was cleaning it up and tightening the brakes. It was as good as new when he finished. Here is Rebecca testing it out in our driveway.

We hope to build up the girls' biking skills so that we can all ride on the Camel bike path in western Cornwall. It's a reclaimed rail line, similar to the Virginia Creeper bike trail in southwest Virginia, and it runs along the Camel River.

The village hall is really a community center that hosts a preschool, community events like the pantomime that we went to during our first month here, Monday night badminton (yes, badminton - it's a real sport!), and Friday yoga, in addition to other events. They even hosted a night of Cornish poetry and music on St. Piran's Day, March 5 (St. Piran is the patron saint of Cornwall).

The village hall also has a great playground that was constructed with funds raised, in part, by the residents of Harrowbarrow and Metherell about a year ago.

It is a kid favorite, especially for our kids. There are swings and slides and climbing walls,

a fenced-in combination basketball/football pitch (have you ever seen a basketball court with a grass floor?),

a gazebo that people actually sit in while the kids play (have you ever noticed that gazebos are usually empty?),

and the girls' favorite, a miniature zip line.

The equipment is all empty in these pictures because the girls had a serious variation of hide-and-seek going on with some friends from the village.

Other than a quick trip to Cotehele Quay for some ice cream and a quick trip to the Cross House to check out their excellent playground in the beer garden, we spent the rest of the weekend at home. The girls love the trampoline in the side yard. They spend a lot of time out here no matter the weather, making up games and shows. Yes, some of you may find it hard to believe (or probably not!), but the girls have actually made up trampoline shows to add to their repertoire of performances. They keep saying that they'd like a trampoline like this at home, but they don't seem to realize that we don't have a flat space this big in our entire yard in Boone!

There are also handmade swings all over the property. At last count, I've seen five of them. The field behind Rebecca in the picture below is the village's version of a CSA, or community-supported agriculture. They plowed the field last week and I heard that they were to plant over the weekend (or 'at the weekend' as they say around here). I can't imagine farmer's planting at home in March! They're now in the planning stages for a community orchard.

The football pitch in the garden has also become a frequent place for us to spend some time. The Matcham's son, Dominic, is a budding professional footballer. He's had this mini football pitch since he was a kid, and the girls and I have enjoyed kicking footballs around, sometimes with Dominic joining us. Gwendolyn has been working on her goalkeeping skills. Check out her football boots (literally!).

She and I have come up with a simulated football game that I have yet to win. She does a goal kick, and I have to take a shot from wherever the ball ends up. If I score, I get a point; if I miss, she gets a point. The odds are definitely stacked against me, especially as her kicking and keeping skills have improved. I've lost 15-4, 15-5, 15-5, ... My best loss was 15-11.

I'm now mostly kicking from the equivalent of midfield on a real pitch. When the ball is too close to the goal, I kick left-footed. I think that she ended up blocking this shot. She should be ready for keeping duties on her team this fall, at least I think that she'll know what she's doing this year. (Last year she didn't want to use her hands!)

Finally, here's a view out the far end of the garden with an assortment of swings and Liz's greenhouse. On school days you can see the kids out playing at lunchtime from here.