Ael Y Bryn

I am a gardener, historian, writer, mother and general dogsbody.  On these pages you will find general gardening chat, essays on medieval history and other of my creative outlets.  Should you wish to use any of my pictures or quote from my essays you may do so provided you have the courtesy to site your sources.  Thankyou.

I spend  most of my time in the garden, sowing seeds in the greenhouse if its raining, weeding just after the rain has stopped and deadheading in the sunshine.  our garden lies on an east facing welsh hill and we are about 1,000 feet above sea level enjoying mild days and cold nights in the summer and relatively mild days and freezing nights in the winter.  We are a smallholding of 6.5 acres but the area laid to garden is just under an acre and the garden surrounds the house like a muffler.  there are drawbacks to gardening in Wales, the slugs are giants! the like of which i have never encountered anywhere else and then of course there is the rain, but at least we are saved the worry of a hose pipe ban. 

As  a family, we are very concerned about the environment and we garden organically, although i have been known to hide a few slug pellets beneath stones to erradicate particularly determined beasties.  My husband John is a plumber and it is true what you have read about copper pipe slugs and snails do not like it. i can grow delphiniums and hostas even with the big slugs that we get here, also if you lay comfrey around your vegetables the slugs should prefer to eat that to your newly planted veg.

My daughter keeps four ponies so we are lucky enough to have a ready supply of manure for the roses and vegetables and we are composting more and more diversly now in an attempt to reduce the rubbish that goes to landfill, its amazing what can go on there really. 

There are six different garden areas, the rose and vegetable garden, the lawned garden, the orchard, the hortus conclusus and my medieval garden where i grow only species that were grown in the medieval period in an area laid out in accordance with medieval symbolism.  Its all to do with a strange obsession that I have with the middle ages!  I am not skilled at this computer lark but will endeavour to include lots of pictures so that we can walk around the garden together. This first picture is how the vegetable garden looked in 2005 as you can see i grow  a hotch potch of vegetables and flowers, it is usually full of bees and insects and smells superb.  Sometimes i find so much to do there that the rest of the garden is overlooked, the green hut is where i sit with cups of coffee and biscuits in the winter and do my seed sowing and potting up,

I'm a  haphazzard gardener and tend to  bung plants in where i spy a space but sometimes the result is surprisingly pleasing, i was so happy with this bed last year, its an exuberant tangle of purple and blue.

and the next picture is of my medieval garden.  it is all laid out according to medieval symbolism and the plants grown here are all medieval species or as near as i could find. the cruciform paths represent the four rivers that flow out of Eden and there are two bay trees representing the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. its a fragrant space and very restful the central feature houses a pool (narcissus' well) and the fences and rose arbour are clothed with Rosa Alba and Rosa Gallica Officinalis the roses of york and lancaster.  there is also a Rosamundi named after the mistress of Henry II, Rosamund Clifford.

The garden at the  back of the house I call my Hortus Conclusus, it is very pretty, the edges are planted out with mature flowering shrubs, rhodedenron, camellia and mock orange to name  but a few.  The centre bed is planted with herbacious perennials and more herbs and there is a small wildllife pond that is home to several goldfish, frogs and damsel flies.  A stone path winds through beds spilling over with achemilla mollis and aromatic herbs and a pergola constructed from salvaged pine trunks from the forestry is smothered with hops and clematis.  The trouble is that the garden never seems to come out very successfully in a photograph but I will put some on anyway and hope that you can get some idea.