Shropshire

Today’s The Day ~ Bishop’s Castle Carnival

There are times when Bishop’s Castle might strike one as a sleepy place, but looks can deceive. This is a town that knows how to party, and there are several festivals through the year. Today is carnival day. The parade kicked off at 1.pm. headed by the town crier caught here on his cell phone – a pleasing conjunction of time past and present on the communications front.

Fat Cat Brass followed on his heels, setting the tone – full-on jollification despite the cool and gloomy day.

And then came the floats, with much emphasis on growing and farming and country living: lots of vintage tractors, classic vehicles, steam engines and the timber merchants’ smart fleet of trucks hauling the big floats.

After wending around the town and down our street, the parade headed for the park for an afternoon and evening of fun and games: bouncy castle, live music, falconry demo, sheep show and mini digger competition not the least of it.

And now in late afternoon, the sun has come out. A grand day out all round then.

#SimplyRed Day 5

Six-Word Saturday

Blown Away

The first opium poppies have bloomed their best, the bees done their work. Seed capsules are primed, the fancy skirts discarded, blown off on the breeze.

If I leave them, the pods will ripen until crisp and brown as walnut shells. The merest tap will have them shedding seed like shaking a salt cellar. And come next summer, they’ll be back again. Or maybe not. Poppies, I find, are a capricious lot. Love me while you can, they say.

#SimplyRed Day 4

Ladybirds ~ The Gardener’s Pest Controllers

Much like poppies, ladybirds come with instant eye-appeal. Who knows why: the shiny red wing cases that look like polished enamel; those striking black dots. From infancy I was anyway brought up with the notion of them: those lovely Ladybird children’s books so exciting to receive; cosy Ladybird cotton jumpers (items now known as sweatshirts) in bright primary colours. I had a red one, the colour of the ladybird. And a yellow one, the colour of this Golden Marguerite (Anthemis tinctora).

These days, as a more than grown up gardener, I mostly appreciate their appetite for aphids. They are at their most voracious during the larval stage, when they are distinctly creepy beasties: the minute Darth Vaders of insectdom:

https://www.field-studies-council.org/shop/publications/ladybird-larvae-guide/

So do not squash!

Some of their kind also eat scale insects and feed on mildew, a fact I’ve only just discovered as I’m writing this.

And another surprising find (to me anyway) that according to the Woodland Trust site there are 26 kinds of ladybird in the British Isles, with our gardens likely to be host to several species at any one time. I’ve only ever registered the existence of three or four types, including the Seven-Spot in the header photo. One of the commonest is an incomer from Asia – the Harlequin, which may be black with red spots or vice versa. It also eats aphids, but may at times predate on native ladybirds. Advice seems to be to let it alone. Trying to eradicate it might involve too much mis-identification of native species which have similar livery.

Looking now through my allotment photo archive, I’ve found I’ve snapped a Twenty-Two Spot ladybird. At least I think that’s what it is. It’s on a dahlia leaf and is one of the mildew eating varieties.

Seven-Spotters in action on an aphid colony

#SimplyRed Day 3 Becky has us all in clover today.

My Garden Supervisor: Robin Not So Red

Perhaps it’s the time of year, the courtship fine feathers and family raising done, but this robin’s breast looks to me more orange than red. I think it may be moulting time too. Some days when it pops into the garden, it looks as if it’s got out of its nest on the wrong side – feathers every which way. But then sloppy personal grooming doesn’t stop it from giving me hard looks, scrutinizing every gardening move in case worms and grubs are in the offing.

These days it is not so insistent and no longer perches on the nearest pot and cheeps until I make some attempt to provide. Not so many mouths to feed. So now, when it sees I’m only dead-heading or watering, it soon vanishes. Clearly it has other calls to make about the town.

#SimplyRed Day 2 Today on July Squares, Becky pays tribute to Cee whose inspiring photo challenges brought so many of us together. She is very much missed.

The Changing Seasons: June 2025

My last post perhaps gave the impression that there’s little room for flowers in our small garden; that all my attention has been on growing stuff to eat. But not so. June has been wonderfully floriferous, especially in the border atop the terrace wall. And beneath it, while the geraniums, centaurea, foxgloves, valerian and St. Cecilia rose came to full bloom, Graham sat on a chair, suitably hatted, and methodically chipped off the failed and peeling plaster. Our builder, Alan, says he’ll come and re-do it in autumn. And while he’s here sort out the old back garden steps. The house improvements continue.

St. Cecilia rose, Ann Thomson geranium, Sherbet Fizz pot marigold

Looking from the top of the garden towards the kitchen door, the border runs between the far end of shed and the right hand path. It also includes two miniature apple trees planted back in the autumn. The rose, St. Cecilia, was languishing there when we moved in nearly two years ago, but she’s had a good feed and a hard prune, and this June has been flowering wonderfully. She may be a tad wishy-washy colour-wise, but she has an exquisitely delicate scent.

Self-sown foxgloves among the geraniums at the path end of the border

The garden peripheries have also bloomed over the last couple of weeks, surprising given our near total lack of rain for many weeks. In the northerly corner the medicinal herb, St. John’s Wort is now soaring into the apple tree. I grew it from seed donated by a supporter of the Bishop’s Castle Seed Bank. The seed packets sit in a tray at the Town Hall and are free, although donations are welcomed.

Also blooming for the first time is this dreamy perennial foxglove. It has a tendency to flop somewhat in warmer temperatures, and has been struggling in the dry soil under the big apple tree. Mulching with hot-bin compost helped. And some hand watering of course.

And another cool looking plant that’s just started to flower. A white mallow. She’s been in several spots around the garden, but is now in the rear westerly corner, behind the Rooster potatoes and in front of a very nice miniature crab apple tree. The moves seem to have left her unscathed:

At the front of the house we have two biggish square beds, created after removing ugly paving (recycled into shed base and new back garden steps), but they are very much a work in progress. In the southerly one, I have some currently very small shrubs growing on, a couple of escallonias and a cistus, and in the meantime there’s a mix of herbaceous perennials and annuals, cosmos and zinnias, filling the spaces.

I was missing my Evereste crab apple tree, and managed to find a miniature one. It’s planted in a small circular raised bed of corten steel which I’m expecting to rust. Around it are some assorted small plants, including a white rock rose and Santolini rosmarinifolia, which are evergreen, Salvia Salavatore, and a trailing plant, Oregano Kent Beauty (centre front). This last was a wonderful plant discovery courtesy of Jude at Cornwall in Colours. I’d never seen it before I saw it on her blog. It really seems to like our garden, so thank you, Jude.

In the background right, not yet flowering, are three alcalthaea – a cross between mallow and hollyhocks. They are apparently short-lived perennials, but we’ll see. Last year they grew very tall and had to be curtailed, but their peachy pale flowers were very pretty.

Plants apart, the main activity in June was having our drive dug up by Justin, Bishop’s Castle’s professional excavator sans pareil. He mostly had to use a pick, this because the exact location of our water main pipe was uncertain. And this was happening because we wanted our rusted hundred year old, cast iron water pipe replaced with a plastic one. To say this was one heavy duty task is an understatement. Order is restored, but the drive now needs to be resurfaced.

Out beyond the garden gate:

A week last Sunday in Bishop’s Castle we had midsummer celebrations in the form of a gathering of Morris dancing troupes, local and further flung. They started on Sunday morning with rousing performances and much drumming at the next door care home, after which they streamed up the road past the house to continue performing at the top of the town. Later when we tried to drive out of the town by our usual route, we found the road ahead full of dancers and musicians, and were advised that they might be there for some time and so would we mind making a detour. We didn’t. It was all good fun and surely makes a change from having multiple local roads closed for cable laying.

And yesterday (Sunday) we treated ourselves to another local institution – climbing to the top of the town to visit the House on Crutches Museum. (I forgot to take a photo of the outside so click on the link to see it). We hadn’t been for two years, but it’s a wonderfully quirky collection, revealing many aspects of Bishop’s Castle history, in particular how it featured on the ancient drovers’ route out of Wales, a way of life and of making a living that survived some 800 years. At the top of the rickety stairs that we both managed to fall up, I stopped to take this view down the High Street: a sleepy Sunday in Bishop’s Castle.

Today as I write this, on the last day of June, we are having our hottest day so far this year, apparently 29 degrees C (84 degrees F) at 3 pm this afternoon at Shropshire’s weather station in Shawbury. Now at 6 pm it’s 26 degrees in the house, but there’s a pleasant breeze in the garden, as there has been all day. Tomorrow, temperatures begin to fall, and in fact by next Sunday it will be 12 – 15 degrees C, this according to YR the Norwegian Met Office, which is pretty good on UK weather. And this may also mark the beginning of rain. At last! Yesterday, we had a few sprinkles and the plants all stood up tall, as if expecting a good drench. They were duly teased.

And so I’ll round this up with a shot of the snapdragons that have flowered heroically all through June, and with not a drop of water from me. They are pretty much over now and making lots of seed. I think I’ll give them their heads. Next June I could have a whole bed of snapdragons. How wonderful would that be.

The Changing Seasons is hosted monthly by Brian at bushboys world and Ju-Lyn at Touring My Backyard. Please pay them a visit.

Six On Saturday ~ Produce!

As you can see, the ‘upstairs’ garden behind our house is really rather modest. And here, currently, and probably for the foreseeable future, chaos reigns; this courtesy of a gardener who still thinks her growing spaces comprise two seventy by 15 foot allotment plots plus the home garden with its adjacent stretch of ‘guerrilla gardened’ field over the back fence. Heigh ho! Those were the days when we lived beside Wenlock Edge.

Now, mostly settled in our new home, I do know I must cut my cultivating cloth according to the physical means of production. (The lawns, though, do seem to keep shrinking). Also this year there’s been the matter of watering through the mostly rainless months of spring and early summer. This has been quite hard work. (I know mulching is much of the answer, but my hot compost bin can only yield so much stuff, and so far it’s spread rather too thinly). And then there are birds and cats and insects to contend with which means everything edible has to be netted, which is not very attractive. So, as I say, chaos presently reigns, but with a few organised segments in between.

1.) The first of these to produce excitement in the Farrell household are the two short rows of potatoes. They were planted at the end of March, ten in each row. Even with little rain, and not much watering, the Belle de Fontenay have produced some lovely salad potatoes. (They’re also a main crop variety if left longer, but that’s unlikely to happen).

Behind them is a row of Rooster red spuds, also main crop. The plants have grown astonishingly tall, given the weather, while the Belle de Fontenay have flopped flat in front of them. I think the Rooster must have commandeered the downward flow of any available groundwater from the hill above.

2.) The next excitement this week was a bunch of carrots, and not a single sign of carrot root fly in any of them. I have attempted to protect the rows by growing them in a raised bed, between onions and covered with some fine mesh. Last year all my carrots were root-flied.

3.) We eat a lot of greens, and this year I’ve grown some different varieties of kale, including, pink frilly, Tuscan, and a crossed Tuscan and Daubenton’s perennial kale, the seed produced by a forest gardener on eBay. (There’s also some Swiss chard in the bunch below.) I know kale isn’t to everyone’s taste, and I’ve yet to try this, but I recently learned you can roast it till crispy. This involves ripping up the washed and dried leaves (without the stalks), tossing the pieces in oil, spreading them on a baking sheet and cooking for 15-20 minutes in a fairly hot oven. Sesame seeds and favourite spices along with sea salt and black may be added.

4.) Yesterday we ate our first homegrown courgette (zucchini), and very nice it was too, sliced and lightly browned in the fat from cooked lardons and then added to a salad.

I put the plant in beside the compost bin, a position that clearly is suiting it. I have some yellow courgettes coming on nearby.

5.) Also in last night’s salad were the first of the field beans. These are a variety of broad (fava) bean, grown mostly in the UK as animal feed or as a green manure, ploughed back in the soil before producing beans. This, I feel, is a lost opportunity. The plants grow four or five feet and taller, while the beans themselves are little bigger than peas. But then the plants are prolific, and so ideal if you haven’t a large enough space to grow their bigger cousins. My field bean plot is around a square metre/yard.

They have anyway, become something of a summer staple in the Farrell household. Picked at the right moment they are deliciously tender and can work as a rather good imitation of guacamole. If they get over-ripe and a bit floury, they make excellent soup and refried beans. The downside is they are fiddly to pod. But then the mass of little pods is good fodder for the hot compost bin, as is all the vegetation (chopped up) when the plants are done.

6.) Last but not least on the garden foraging front are the marigolds (Calendula officionalis). I use them in herbal tea. They contain all sorts of therapeutic properties, known and made use of for a couple of thousand years. But mostly I add the petals to salads, taking care not to include any passing hoverfly. This particular variety is called Sherbet Fizz. We also have lots of self-seeded bright orange and yellow ones from last year’s crop. I love them all. They have to be one of the most heartening of flowers. Simply to gaze on them lifts the spirits.

Six on Saturday: Please call on Jim. There’s always lots to look at and discover in his Cornish garden.

Ructions At The Roost

I don’t know what’s going on with the jackdaws who roost in the big ash tree on the hill above our house. Lately they’ve been bursting over the garden with much clamour and commotion. The eruptions can happen at any time, which is very disturbing when one is hanging out the washing.

Usually big aerial displays of corvids take place at dusk. This seems different though. A bit of a fracas perhaps: the newly fledged offspring coming to terms with their established community, and vice versa. Anyway it strikes this human onlooker as one big family row. Well, just imagine having to live in one tree with this crowd.

Garden Treasures: The Salvaged And The Self-Seeded

Well, this was a big surprise last week, and a very lovely one too. It is the unexpected outcome of a little rescue job performed over a year ago, not long after we’d moved into The Gables. Back then, in the August of 2023, I was making a start on de-jungling various flower beds and found some rhizome fragments swamped by phygelius and euonymus and assorted weedy thugs. They had small spikes of green and white leaves and I thought they might be Japanese iris so I replanted them in a cleared corner and pretty much forgot about them. They certainly didn’t do anything last summer, and when I looked at them early this spring I decided that they weren’t likely to either.

So it just goes to show what can happen when you’re not paying attention.

The spot where they’re growing is fairly sheltered, between Graham’s shed, a blackcurrant bush, the path and the hot composting bin. They are also being encroached on by some super-charged perennial helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ (more of which in a moment). And here’s the puzzle.

When I first spotted the opening iris I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. It looked exactly like the wild yellow flag that grows in and near ponds and marshes. The only difference appeared to be the green stripy leaves. Some internet sleuthing was thus required, and this soon revealed that the iris was indeed a variegated cultivar of the wild form. But how come? There is no standing water in its vicinity. Until last week we’ve been many weeks without rain, and on sunny days, out of the wind, it’s been quite hot, leaving other herbaceous plants in parched beds.

Then I considered the size of the neighbouring helianthus clump. The first shoots are waist high already and the leaves huge. I then began to wonder if the hot compost bin has been having a hand in things. It does make a quantity of liquid gloop which, if I haven’t drained it, dribbles onto the path and onto the flower bed (?). Also the soil there is largely unimproved and thus dark and heavy; slow to dry out where the shed shades it.

Hm. Who knows? I’m just hoping that the iris will decide to stay. There are signs that the plant with the flowering stem is beginning to clump up. The smaller cuttings, in amongst a spreading geranium and rudbeckia, are also beginning to look promising. And now we’ve installed a nearby water butt, I’ve no excuse not monitor watering requirements.

All the same, all the gardening sites do call the variegated yellow flag a wetland plant, and also warn that it, too, can develop thuggish tendencies. A watching brief then.

I rescued this geranium phaeum album early last summer. I discovered it behind the compost bin, lurking mostly under the fence with next door’s garden. It’s now growing under the apple tree at the bottom of the garden, though it’s a spot prone to drying out. It’s doing better in an open sunny border along with geranium Anne Thomson. Damp shadiness is supposed to suit it best.

The recent downpours have bruised many of the geranium faces, but the rescued clumps of Johnson’s Blue (I think that’s what they are) have been putting on a good show and pleasing the bees.

Here they are with this year’s number one self-seeders: white foxgloves. They are everywhere about the garden, although there was no sign of white ones over the last two summers. I love their cool and stately demeanour.

And at the hotter end of the colour palette, in the front garden we have a row of snapdragons, self-seeded along the wall in a remarkably orderly fashion. Anyone would think I’d put them there.

They glow in late afternoon sunshine.

Throughout May we had profusions of columbines, mostly pink and dark mauve. They are actually too much of good thing on the self-seeding front, and I spend much time rooting seedlings out of the vegetable beds. But then amongst them were two plants of delicate lavender, each with a different ‘frock’, one by the green house, and another in the far corner behind an apple tree. They are over now. But I know where they are.

Six On Saturday Please visit host Jim’s lovely garden – so many treats to be found there.

This Morning’s Walk With Some Rural Geometry

Barn roofs, gates, styles, fence- field- crop- and power-lines, pylons and pole shadows. Oh yes, and some bull rushes…

A brilliant sun-frosty morning and, so we’re told, the last of the super-cold days. But just the morning for a hike up to the dew ponds above the town.

I love this green lane, perhaps the remains of an ancient thoroughfare between settlements, this before the creation of the modern road system, or maybe even part of the old drovers’ routes out of Wales, shepherds and cattlemen driving their flocks and herds to markets in the English Midlands.

Bishop’s Castle was anyway an important market centre at least as far back as the thirteenth century, when the Bishops of Hereford ruled it from their castle at the top of town. Charters were granted for weekly markets and seasonal fairs to be held outside the castle walls.

On market days this now quiet track might well have been bustling with carts, farmers’ wives with their produce: ducks, geese, hens, eggs, butter, cheeses; farm boys on foot, driving pigs, goats, cattle and sheep to sell. Other traders too might have come this way: basket, hat and chair makers, dealers in songs, fortune tellers, herbalists, and street musicians.

The Long Mynd

At the top of the hill are some dew ponds. These are man-made pools, created in upland areas without natural water sources, to provide for grazing stock. Water then collects in them, either rain or field run-off. Some may date from the Neolithic period, that is 6-7,000 thousand years ago. Others may date from the Middle Ages or more recently in the 18th/19th centuries when there was still a high demand for wool. Much skill was required to make them. They started out as a saucer-shaped excavation, about a metre (3 feet) deep, and anywhere between 3-15 metres in diameter. This was then lined with straw, followed by an impermeable layer of puddled clay.

One of the dew ponds no longer in use for stock watering is in its own enclosed domain and filled with bull rushes.

There are many fine views all round from this point on the footpath; also another dew pond, not presently in use:

And in the field with the operational dew pond, lots of ewes waiting to have their lambs:

At this point we retrace our steps, although we could (if all of us were willing) follow the path for several more miles, taking a wide loop back into town. Instead, we head straight down the hill, watching the ribbon of fog flowing along the far valley from Clun towards Craven Arms. We’ve recently learned that this mist phenomenon, rather common in these parts, is also called brume.

Finally at the foot of the hill by the Wintles, another favourite old barn:

And by now it was lunchtime so we called in at Tahira’s Chai Shop on the High Street for some delicious beef and vegetable samosas (also geometrical) plus lots of good chatting, topped off with (triangular) slices of Rose’s light-as-a-feather, and mouth-wateringly warm cardamom cake. None of which stayed on our plates long enough to think about taking photos. Sorry.

#GeometricJanuary Day 16

Geometrically Inventive: The World’s First Cast Iron Bridge 1779

I rather miss having the Iron Bridge on our doorstep. It’s now a good hour’s drive across the county from our house in Bishop’s Castle. We used to like wandering along the Wharfage beyond the bridge, gazing up at the hanging woodland along Benthall Edge. It’s a great place for promenading, or at least it is when the River Severn is safely in its bed.

River Severn on the rise

The Iron Bridge, though, has withstood the most tremendous deluges, including the great flood of 1795 that took out most of the old stone bridges from Shrewsbury to Worcester. It was a show of resilience that proved to anyone who had doubted the capacities of large cast iron structures, that its builder, Abraham Darby III, had been right all along: cast iron was the material of choice for the industrial age.

Nor did its adoption take long. Soon it would be used to build the frames of factories; seen as a boon for the owners of textile mills whose combustible raw materials made them prone to ruinous conflagration. The several-storeyed iron-framed buildings that ensued were forerunners for the skyscrapers of the modern age.

On closer inspection, though, Abraham Darby’s ‘world wonder’ innovation came with more than a hint of sticking to the tried and trusted. After all, the man was an ironmaster, from a dynasty of ironmasters, and thus a pragmatist, and while the use of cast iron for so big a project was breaking new ground, the hundred foot span was achieved by the jointing of over 1,700 castings, some weighing over 5 tons, and using centuries’ old woodworking techniques of dovetail, mortise and tenon joints.

Besides, there was something else he was wanting to prove: that a bridge with a single arch could be made to span a waterway, busy with large sailing barges. To achieve this meant another significant breakthrough: the Severn trows could pass beneath without the nuisance of lowering their masts. It was all good for publicity.

‘The Cast Iron Bridge near Coalbrookdale’ by William Williams 1780

The bridge and the foundries, furnaces and forges of Coalbrookdale became the tourist venue of the age. Engineers, ironmasters, industrial spies and scores of artists flocked to wonder at what many likened to a vision of hell. The William Williams image above was painted a year before the official opening of the bridge to the general public. You can see three trows moored along the right hand river bank.

And of course, as a World Heritage site, the Iron Bridge is still a huge tourist attraction, seen here spanning a quiet and sluggish summer river.

GeometricJanuary Day 11

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge