White Horses of Wiltshire and the garden

Just before I came back to Australia a couple of weeks ago I took these photographs to show you... The first is of a white horse chalk carving high up on the hills very near our cottage in Wiltshire. In fact I pass it most days when I am in England - quite majestic isn't it ? I thought it was looking particularly lovely that evening with the rapeseed flowers at the fore front. Wiltshire is the county for white horses. There are or were at least twenty-four of these hill figures in Britain, with no less than thirteen being in Wiltshire, and another white horse, the oldest of them all, being just over the border in Uffington, Oxfordshire. Most of the white horses are chalk hill carvings, and the chalk downs of central Wiltshire make it an ideal place for such figures.
Of the thirteen white horses known to have existed in Wiltshire, eight are still visible, and the others have either been lost completely, or are in a sense still there, under the turf, but have long since become grown over and are no longer visible.
The Uffington white horse is of certain prehistoric origin, being some three thousand years old. Most of the others date from the last three hundred years or so. The one above I believe dates from around 1857.





The next couple of photographs are the last ones I took of the garden the day I left the cottage just after I had done a last tidy up - mowed the lawn and done a little thinning and pruning...

You can see from the photo how tiny the garden is - it runs down the side of the house and the white cottage at the back of the photograph is my neighbour's. Still, it is the perfect size and can be looked after from afar with a friend of ours (who happens to be a landscape gardener) coming in every 10 days or so during the Summer to check on the shrubs etc. and mow the lawn - really it needs very little actual looking after which is a good thing in the circumstances.

Particularly like this photo - wonder if the roses around that door have come out by now?

LEAPING HARES

I really adore hares.... best of all I love seeing them running wild in the fields near me, here in Wiltshire (UK) - sometimes you are lucky enough in the long summer evenings to see them in pairs, or resting for a minute on their hind legs.... Whatever the time of day it is always a magical sight.

Julieann Worrall is an artist who is local to me who creates the most wonderful life size (and larger) willow structures of hares.... (2 photos immediately above) and she also makes smaller wire hares too and I am lucky enough to own a pair of these which I photographed with my beloved French 'deux-corps' cabinet as the background (second photograph). And the first photograph I have taken, at the top, is a print by an artist called Catherine Hyde which I have propped up on the mantelpiece at the moment while it's waiting to be framed.

Hope you enjoy.....