The passage of time…

October 2021

October has been another month spent mostly inside and I’ve been marking the passage of time in more ways than one including developing my observational and drawing skills through an online Portrait course with the Royal Drawing School.

Print deadlines have kept me at my desk completing designs for 2023 and 2024 calendars for my UK and German publishers. Working so far in advance feels rather like waiting for seeds to germinate, grow and flower - not quite sure what may happen in the interim but cautiously looking forward to a good outcome. 

It’s strange looking back too. It’s 25 years since the first Garden Days calendars were published. So much has changed in my life since then and each year around this time we’re contacted by customers with their own stories. Many with children who have grown up and left home continue to buy the Family Organiser because new functions have been found for the five columns. One family use it for their bed and breakfast bookings so each column now represents a room in their house rather than a family member. Another, a physiotherapist uses it to log appointments. One loyal customer of many years wrote saying she has saved all her past Slim Calendars as an accurate record of events and another told me that as a child she loved being allowed to cut up the ‘pictures’ at the end of each year to stick in her craft books. Incredibly one person said she has bought the Diary every single year since 1997. How grateful I am to each and every one of you for such incredible support.

Year on year I’ve made fresh illustrations to introduce into the calendars so when mushrooms appeared in grass near a silver birch tree I brought some inside to paint. I fear they could be dreaded honey fungus although they aren’t growing in close clumps and don’t have pale-coloured gills which research tells me are two of the signs to look out for.  

Honey fungus attacks and kills the plant roots while spreading through root systems and infecting nearby plants and is currently listed as the UK’s number one garden disease. Most woody and herbaceous perennials are at risk including Birch, Privet, Lilac, Leylandii Cypress, Viburnum, Hawthorn and Eleagnus, all of which are particularly susceptible. 

Infected plants must be removed but even then it’s extremely hard to eradicate the disease. I’m in the process of getting an accurate identification from the RHS and hoping that our fungi are harmless - I’m afraid a pragmatic outlook is the only one to have in this case!

Thanks for reading, happy autumn gardening:-)