It's spring and this picture makes me long to start growing things. I think vegetables and fruit are among the most beautiful and colourful things of our world and this picture is full of colour! I love fruit and veg markets in other countries; huge piles of glorious knobbly tomatoes, shiny onions, exquisite furry-feeling fragrant peaches, oranges that still smell fresh from the tree (oranges in our supermarkets, indeed vegetables and fruit in general in our supermarkets, have very little smell which makes shopping a very dull experience).

My garden is very tiny, but even so I have runner-beans in a large tub, trained up bamboo canes; I have a patch of excellently sweet rhubarb; a Crispin apple tree that generously fruits every year even though it too is small as yet; and I'll be growing salad rocket in pots. On my window-sill are some potato tubers chitting up, and I am going to try growing these in bin bags full of compost. You start them off in a small layer of rich comppost, in a bag with its sides rolled down like sagging socks, and you add more compost and roll the bag up a little more as the plants begin to grow. I am told you can produce quite an amount of potatoes this way. We'll see!
In past years I grew the beans up the fences, muddled in with the roses and summer jasmines, but they never did very well that way so let's hope they do better in their tub. I might try some baby beetroot in the borders in with the flowers, but the soil is very sandy here and dries out very fast; root vegetables aren't too keen on that. Radish maybe? Except I'm not too keen on radish. Probably I should be preparing for climate warming by planting drought-loving flowers, or cacti or something: maybe I could try star apples; they grew on reasonably small trees in Malaysia, or papayas which grow straight and tall, perfect for that 'vertical' element in the garden. Although after last winter's bitterly cold weeks perhaps not. Or not yet at any rate...

I have just come back from a Writers' Retreat at Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre for Wales. This is a place every writer should spend time at: it has a really special atmosphere, very conducive to writing; it is run by some truly good people, who are so friendly, kind, and generous, and it says much for the place itself that most of them have been here a long time; they love to work here. That in itself is a sign of how welcoming Ty Newydd is. You are well looked after, well fed, and for those moments when you need to walk and think or just burst out into the air, there are wonderful scenic walks right on your doorstep: down to the beach at Criccieth or along the woodland path beside the river Dwyfor. If you are interested in wildlife - and I certainly am! - there is so much to see: dippers and goosander on the river; wood anemones, primrose, wood sorrel, dog violet and bluebells in the wood plus the cherries in blossom. In past years I have seen the pied flycatcher here, and the green and the greater spotted woodpecker. Plenty of goldcrests.
Down by the shore I look out for ringed plover, redshank, turnstone, oystercatchers and cormorants and this year I was delighted to see the first wheatear of the season.
The way to the shore leads between high banks of gorse, this year in prolific flower and the rich coconut smell of it was intoxicating. I saw my first swallow, a very fine fellow preening his glistening feathers and his forked tail as he perched on telephone wires. I had a good long look at him through binoculars, and admired his precisely defined colouring: once in Derbyshire I saw two swallows skittering about on a low roof and as the sun caught them I saw how intense the blue of their backs really is - for a brief moment it took on the sheen and brilliance of the kingfisher and was stunning.
But I love Ty Newydd for more then these reasons; there are two places I find I can really get work done, and this is one of them (the other is The Oak Barn in Shropshire - check out Oak Barn Workshops on the web). I love the feeling at Ty Newydd of welcome and warmth when you first step inside the door: it's quirky, with awkward and mysterious staircases, and amazing chimney stacks when seen from the back. It's an old house that belonged to Lloyd George towards the end of his life; he died in what is now the library. When I come here I often have what was his bedroom, a room I especially like, with two marvellous window seats looking out on the long front drive with its beeches and conifers and inviting bend that suggests magic beyond (and there is magic, for this is the way to the river and the woods!) There is nothing pretentious about the house, it's solid, sturdy and at the back it has the feeling of a house that has simply increased in size and adapted to changing needs of its own free will: a bit like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin it has 'growed itself', springing like a strange and affable white mushroom from the earth. And I think it's the word 'affable' that fits it best. You can come here and be yourself like the house, enjoy all that's around you, feel a real part of this wonderful place, and when you leave you take it with you in your heart. Along with several finely covered pages of promising writing, which is the best thing of all! If you haven't been yet and you are a writer, get the brochure and book a course. Or even better a retreat. There's nothing like Ty Newydd. There couldn't be. It's unique.

Post Script

Just a codicil to Sunday's post: Yorkshire was far behind Cheshire in terms of spring flowers; we're in full daffodil glory here while Yorkshire was all hellebores and crocus. Perhaps after all there is a remarkable benefit in going to colder counties; it's a form of time travel, revisiting the season you've just lived through at an earlier stage. (Forget cryogenics; just keep travelling north and regain lost time! It must be the same principle...)

In a small Alpine garden and nursery at Slack Top near Heptonstall there were beautiful crocus in full bloom, along with daphnes, hellebores and an astonishing ruby coloured corydalis which I've never seen before. But I only have a pic of the crocus.

The Entangled Bank

This has been a week of readings, one at the end of March in Hebden Bridge library, reading from the anthology "A Twist of Malice" ( a collection of 'uncomfortable' poems by older women, published by Grey Hen Press, edited by Joy Howard) in which I have 2 poems. Pamela Coren and Gina Shaw were my co-readers and we all had what I call '4 boiled egg' minutes, that is, 12. Hebden Bridge library has just been refurbished and the upper room where we were reading was light, spacious, and had beautiful exposed beams. It was cold in Yorkshire, minus 4 on Saturday night, with a light flurry of snow! Beyond the snow you could still make out the stars in the half-clouded sky - it could almost have been snowing stars, it was so glittery.

Then on Weds April 1st I and two friends set off for Shrewsbury to an event called The Entangled Bank, a celebration in poetry of Darwin. In this bicentenary year Shrewsbury has pulled out all the stops and is celebrating Darwin fulsomely. This was the grand finale of The Entangled Bank, (a quote from Darwin's own work which refers to the rich turmoil of living things in a thickly covered bank of plants). The project began in February with poems being displayed in the Park and Ride buses around Shrewsbury. 24 poems had been displayed, including one of mine called Oak, and that was the reason I was invited to Shrewsbury for this particular event. It was a wonderful evening, some excellent poems by members of the Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society, and all interspersed with readings from Darwin's own memoirs, including his deliberations on the pros and cons of marriage. It was like being fast-tracked through Darwin's life, brilliant! The three of us had a good time and were made very welcome. It really was a most enjoyable night.

The week came to a close with another reading , more local this time and with the group I belong to called Words and Biscuits. We are a mix of prose writers and poets and we used to broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside quite regularly but the programme we were recorded for got axed in favour of sport - sign of the times! So now we take our work to the world by visiting W.I groups in Cheshire and entertaining them with our stories and poems. (One of our group is a W.I member). It can be great fun sometimes; we go to some very tucked-away places, meet all kinds of people and occasionally, as on this night, get plied with huge slabs of home baked fruit cake!

But the week didn't quite come to a close with that: on Saturday night I went off to Theatr Clwyd yet again for another evening of dance; Scottish Dance Theatre this time, an energetic and exciting performance with quite acrobatic moves on the part of the dancers. And in the interval I was lucky enough to get another good look at the North Albanian photographs taken by Rhodri Jones; they had not yet been taken down. So, a thoroughly good week, all in all.