If you have ever wondered why there are so few roses in Grange-over-Sands the reason is that the deer scoff the lot. Deer love roses and indeed lots of other plants. They roam everywhere, in great numbers. The driver of an open top Mercedes was startled one day when driving through Grange when a roe deer jumped into the passenger seat. When we started this garden ten years ago the first thing we did was put up a deer fence all around the garden and a cattle grid at the entrance gate. Gardening would have been impossible otherwise. Our garden is inhabited by all sorts of other creatures- squirrels, mice, rats, bats, cats galore, and we even have a badger sett and we can co-exist with them all, but not the deer. I often see deer circling the garden looking for a way to get in. There are doors in the deer fence and doors are sometimes left open. This happened today, a deer got in and we spent two hours chasing the blighter out. Here it is, trying to hide behind a pile of logs before making its getaway.

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Last year I picked the first rhubarb on the 25th March. Then, for the next three months I ate it every other day- 43 times in all until I let the crop recover at the end of June. One of the consequences of growing your own food is that you get used to having less choice. I never get tired of eating freshly picked fruit in season, although I can understand how tempting it must be to see the wide choice available in a supermarket.
This year, the late spring has held back the rhubarb crop by a fortnight so I only got to pick my first stalks today. The first stems are grown in forcers and because they never receive any daylight they are bright pink. The forcers bring the harvest forward by about a fortnight but they weaken the plant. Fortunately our rhubarb patch is so large and so abundant that half a dozen weakened plants will make little difference to the overall crop.

Our garden is surrounded by woodland, including the 60 acres of Yewbarrow Wood which forms the northern border. So we are never going to free ourselves of squirrels. The red squirrel died out in these parts about 15 years ago, leaving only the grey. Although the greys are very numerous we don’t seem to be as troubled by them as some people are, probably because they have a large natural woodland habitat. But they do have one very annoying and rather inexplicable habit, which is to dig up our daffodils and plant them elsewhere, usually somewhere totally inappropriate. This picture is of a patch of ornamental grass with a clump of daffodils growing in the middle of it. The daffs weren’t there last year and we only discovered them when we cut down the grasses a few weeks ago. The bulbs have been moved at least 50 yards. Actually, I think its quite an attractive, if unusual, design. The grey squirrels may not be as good looking as the reds, but they sure have a talent for garden design.

This Sago Palm (Cycas Revoluta) spent three years outside, in the Gravel Garden, winters included, after which it became rather the worse for wear. The fronds began to turn brown and so, in the autumn of 2008, we brought it into the Orangery to let it recuperate. It sat there, looking poorly and rather forlorn and for a long time we thought it had given up the ghost. We lost the heating in the orangery in the middle of the coldest spell last winter and thought that would be the last straw. Then suddenly, two weeks ago, just as the weather began to get warmer and as we began to give up hope, it sprang into life. The Sago Palm is one of the world’s oldest plants. Its actually a Cycad, not a palm and is very slow growing indeed, taking up to a hundred years to reach ten feet. A slow life, indeed.