Derwen and Dingle

After an exciting Friday on the sea, we had a slightly more relaxed Saturday. Steve headed home feeling a little battered and bruised. I was quite tired too. However, while he was here I suggested we all meet up in Derwen Garden Centre on Saturday. We checked with Anna and Biddy and they were keen too, so that’s what we did.

Derwen

As I’ve mentioned a few times, Derwen in Welshpool is our favourite Garden Centre, it may be about 1 hour 20 minutes drive from here but it’s usually worth it and makes for a nice day out.

We’d mentioned it to Steve and Biddy previously as it’s only about 45 minutes from their house. They’d since been to it and loved it too. So, we all met there at around midday on Saturday and headed straight into the restaurant for what turned out to be more food than we really needed. The tuna melt was delicious, as was the ‘picnic cake’.

We then had a nice stroll around the garden centre. I managed to resist buying too many plants, just a few cyclamen that I had planned to put into the patio pots for some late autumn / early winter colour out the front. I’m having second thoughts about that now though as I think it might just be too exposed for them there.

What we didn’t resist buying was a large rusty piece of metal!! Sounds good hey? It does have some decorative fern fronds on it, and the fact that it is supposed to be ‘rusty’ means that it’ll fit right in our garden where things rust in seconds! In fact, I think it looks really nice in amongst the ferns.

I’ll probably hack back some of the geraniums to the left of it and add another fern or two there. What you can’t see is that this area of the garden is somewhat grandly called the ‘fernery’ as there are a number of other interesting ferns juts out of shot to the right. I think it’s time for a bit of a tidy up here and the purchase of a few more ‘interesting’ ferns too. I’m also planning on extending the garden lighting a little so that I can put a spot light inside the rusty fern tower. It could look quite good lit up at night. Equally, it could look a bit naff but there’s only one way to find out.

We had a little look around inside too. Here I really did have to resist buying anything else. They had some nice houseplants, but I’m kind of running out of places to put them now. Talking of the houseplants, most are doing quite well. I’ll have to add a post with some photos of them later this week.

Dingle

We then decided it would be nice to visit the Dingle Garden as well. This is just up the road and a nice place for a stroll in the sunshine. They have quite a big nursery too with plenty more plants for sale. Anna and I hadn’t been there for a number of years. We wandered around the gardens, taking in a tour of the lake and then looked around the nursery too. Biddy gave in and bought a plant, we were good and resisted temptation.

It was then time to say our goodbyes and head off in opposite directions. Back at home there was time to feed the bees before having a relaxing evening.

The rest of the weekend was fairly relaxing as well. We didn’t go out for our usual brunch on Sunday morning as we’d been out the day before. I also had a sore Achilles and a sore foot in general so I took it easy with no exercise and no adventures. I did spend a bit of time Spring (Autumn) cleaning a couple of rooms in the morning and then sorting out the fish tank in the afternoon. Both pumps had stopped working for some reason. I took them apart and fixed them but I have a feeling they’ll need replacing. Typically you can no longer buy the exact same model so I may have to improvise a little.

The wind looked good on Sunday, but my foot prevented me from going out windsurfing. I’m sure I used to windsurf day after day for weeks on end in the past. These days I seem to need at least a few days to recover from a good session! Anyone would think I was getting older.

Tags: Garden