TWO DEVON GARDENS

This is Joy and Gent’s back garden


This was in February this year. We woke up one morning to find the place white with snow; it was all gone by lunch-time and there was no snow in the front garden or in the road outside. I went to the local shop and the only snow to be seen was in some of the gardens!

The blackbird in the rhubarb isn’t real.

In three years I’ve only seen snow in Devon twice; it didn’t stay more than a few hours.

In the year I've been here I have to confess that I have never put food on this table for the poor birds; it doesn't cross my mind. I took this photo from the back door, which is in the dining room. I sit there every morning and eat my breakfast, look out at the weather but never think to feed the birds. Shame on me.

Another Devon garden I loved

Two years ago I was working near Plymouth; we had daffodils and wasps in January!
This is the view from a garden down near Plymouth; a little village called Newton Ferrers. River at the bottom of the garden, full of boats and children windsurfing in the summer. Accross the river is Bridgend and Noss Mayo, beautiful places, tiny streets, hardly room to turn your car; quite often you have to reverse for someone coming the other way. I worked here for the first year of my freedom; 4 weeks on and one off; worked like a maniac all year then bought my first laptop, and a 4 week TESOL course in Barcelona. In the second year I ran around Devon with my car piled to the gunnels with all my junk; well not all, 'cause I had put a lot of it in storage in Plymouth.

On the map, this is the little nick to the right of Plymouth.

The view from this side of the garden is of Noss Mayo. these houses on the river are selling for around three-quarters of a million quid. The British go mad for river and sea views. I'd love to have a house with a boat tied up at the bottom of the garden; but I'd love even more to have fairies, and a couple of trees with little doors cut into them, and windows.

THE SHOP at Newton Ferrers sells most things, though there is a separate butchers shop, and the omnipresent estate agents.