The British public are so damned polite and relentless in their praise that it comes as a breath of fresh air when you receive a complaint. About five, or it may have been ten, years ago (probably ten as it came hand-written) I received a letter from a visitor saying that it was all very well building gazebos and towers from which to enjoy the view, but this was next to useless if the viewer wasn’t given any clue as to what they were looking at. ​

Slow life doesn’t come any slower than this.  The life models had to keep perfectly still, sometimes in water, for up to an hour.  Alan Ward, who holds a life class at the Storey Institute every Saturday, booked 11 models, 5 male, 5 female and one trans-gender, to pose for his students in my garden.  We were expecting a washout, after two inches of rain had been dumped on us the day before, but by a miracle the clouds disappeared just as the models started to arrive and we were bathed in sunshine all day long.  

I’ve been road testing my new toy, aka the Google Glass, by using it to record a video while out on my bike. The picture quality in video mode isn’t as good as it is for still pictures, but I think it did pretty well whilst I hurtled along at speeds of up to 30 mph. You get a good sense of the fun I’m having on these narrow country lanes.  ​

The bees are back- if they ever went away. As this video vividly shows, the flowers on my echiums are smothered in bees. And as there are several dozen echiums in the garden and each flower spires is between 4 and 6 feet long, this amounts to an awful lot of bees. Honey bees prefer blue flowers, so the lavenders and salvias are also getting their fair share. After the blue flowers in popularity come the white, of which my cabbage palms and sea kale are doing well in attracting bees.
​
In spite of the plethora of honey bees, I don’t keep a working hive at the moment. I’ve got a hive, but can’t spare the time to make my own honey, so I leave that to the experts. As a result I rely on my favourite shop, the Farm Shop at Sizergh for my honey supplies. I buy runny honey, supplied by Nook Farm in Cumbria, which is perfect with my porridge in the morning. But when I looked for the Nook Farm brand, the clear honey was out of stock, so I picked up the jar pictured below. It looked just the ticket, with its artisan jar, and farm shop price. Luckily, I checked the label, which disclosed that it isn’t local at all, not even British. The small print revealed that it was the “produce of EU or non-EU countries”. To my mind, that’s a bit of a con trick. If I was looking for rubbish like that I’d go to Tesco’s and pay half the price. Perhaps I should make my own honey after all.

I caught the squirrel red-handed, or in this case red-toothed, with a ripe strawberry in its mouth.  Not just any strawberry but one of the fattest, reddest, juiciest in my crop.  At moments like this Jeanette Winterson*-like ideas of revenge come to mind, but as the squirrel isn’t as tasty as a rabbit, I’m told, I contented myself with thoughts of a cruel and painful punishment.  But squirrels move fast and I didn’t have my gun with me. ​

“There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted crackling, as it is well called”
            -Charles Lamb “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig”, 1822
​
My Slow Life on a Sunday begins with coffee at the Riverside, a leisurely interlude at Damson Dene and, after my chores have been completed, lunch in the Carvery at Newby Bridge. A Carvery may be spectacularly old hat, but it is close to my heart and in one sense is the very foundation of my career in hospitality. The story begins in 1991 when I became the reluctant owner of the bankrupt and moribund Hill Foot Hotel in Ulverston and wondered what to do with it. Someone suggested that I might find inspiration in the Carvery at the Clarence House Hotel in Dalton, so Margaret and I went one Monday night and we couldn’t believe it. There were 100 guests on what should

This being the Awards season I found myself with 250 other hopefuls at the Castle Green for the Cumbria Tourism awards ceremony. Our Cuckoo Brow was up for “Tourism Pub” of the year, against the Wild Boar, who were unlikely rivals in the pub category, as they are a hotel. I know the Boar well, as it’s just down the road from the Damson Dene and of a very similar size, with 36 bedrooms, as against Damson Dene’s 40. But they have a wonderful talent for reinventing themselves and two years ago walked away with the award for “Best B&B”, which raised quite a few eyebrows amongst the owners of real B&B’s, who have never known the Boar as anything but a hotel. And blow me down they’ve done it again in the pub category. No-one will be surprised if next time they are “Caravan Park of the Year”. Dan and Sally were very gracious in defeat, sending them a warm message of congratulations. They are lovely people and can take solace in the fact that although the Cuckoo Brow is one third the size of the Boar they achieve a lot more 5 Star ratings on Trip Advisor.

The irrepressible Alan Ward has organised another Artists’ Day for my garden, timed for Sunday 6th July to coincide with our NGS Open Day.  Last year about 15 artists came, including Sam Dalby, who is a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Graham Lowe, the potter Diane Fay, Sue Halsam, the weaver Stephanie Halsam, the cartoonist Robin Grenville-Evans, Pat Haskey Knowles, Alison Bradley, Barbara Holt, Chris Rigby, Jane Worthington, Gerry Haddock, Fran Edney and Stephanie Armstrong.  

May last year was taken up with counting my losses.  My collection of cannas was decimated, literally, down from 250 to 25.  This was because I’d had to leave them outside while the new greenhouse was being built and they were killed by the late frosts.  Nearly all my Echiums were gone, but losses amongst the dahlias were less severe.  This year the casualties have been negligible, but I’ve had to contend with a potentially more significant loss, that of Matt, who had gardened for me for ten years. ​

It’s difficult to know how to describe our new B & B; ‘up-market’, ‘luxurious’ ‘beautiful’ are phrases which have been suggested, but one word which undoubtedly applies is ‘photogenic’. Hence this video, which uses some of the images taken by photographer Mark Gillow.  The rooms at Bay Villa are the best in Grange, indeed the whole of “Roganville”, and would be exceptional anywhere.  ​

Everyone knows, because it’s repeated all the time, that the Lakes is impossibly crowded during the holidays.  Except that it isn’t, and it’s only lazy commentators who say so.  All the hotels in the Lakes are full this Bank Holiday weekend (at least, mine are) but the National Park is so vast that you don’t have to try very hard to avoid the crowds.
​
​This afternoon I set off on my bike from Grange, through Lindale and along the road to Cartmel Fell. ​

The contrast with last year couldn’t be more striking. In April 2013 I spent most of the month counting my losses. First the Echiums, which had sailed through two winters and were ready for flowering until they were struck down by late frosts. I lost nearly a hundred. And then the cannas, which I had been forced to leave outside while the new greenhouse was being built, and which also succumbed to the unseasonal cold. Another hundred plants gone.​

Is a Slow Life journey to work possible in London? Never, I thought, until the tube workers’ strike proved me wrong. I needed to get to the Excel conference centre, a journey which involved a journey to the City by tube, and then a DLR train to Docklands. DLR stands for Docklands Light Railway. This journey is perhaps the very opposite of the Slow Life ideal, which was epitomised in my description of the journey to Cuckoo Brow.
​
The tube strike alerted me to an alternative route, which would avoid the horrors of the underground. I could take the river boat from the Embankment to the O2 stadium and a cable car from there, over the Thames to Excel. On a lovely warm sunny spring day, this journey was next to perfection. A £6 ticket paid for a half hour trip along the river past the London Eye, Big Ben, St Paul’s, Tower Bridge and The Shard. It was worth it, just to hear the oohs and aahs of the German tourists on board. When I disembarked at the O2 to my surprise, I was the only passenger headed for Excel. The trip on the cable car, which I had to myself, was every bit as impressive as a go on the London Eye. The trade show at the Excel was packed – I don’t know how the other delegates got there, but I’m certain that none of them had as enjoyable a journey as mine.

Carl Taylor, who has built more than quarter of a mile of limestone walling in my garden is an artist as well as a craftsman. He likes to add artistic flourishes to his work and I’ve never been able to fathom  whether it’s from his love of the job or to see the look of astonishment on my face when I see it.  A good example is the stone flower which he unexpectedly incorporated into the wall of the boiler house next to the Orangery (below); another is the niche which he built into the wall on my bedroom extension overlooking the garden, complete with an elegant slate base. This was some time ago, and I hadn’t got round to finding a suitable ornament to put in the niche, other than having a vague discussion with Alan Ward, my sculptor, as to what might work.
Fortunately, Alan isn’t as lackadaisical as I am, and got on with the job, turning up one day with the perfect little sculpture shown in the photo above.  He explained that it represents Cornucopia – the horn of plenty which dispenses unlimited quantities of food, drink and other riches.  It is embellished with gold.  Nothing could be more perfect for the little niche overlooking the garden. Carl’s spirit is contagious.

In 2011 a statue of Leda and the Swan, which had sat in the garden of Aske Hall at Richmond in Yorkshire for four centuries was sold at auction for £12.2 million. This was encouraging news for us because on that very day Alan Ward was hard at work creating our very own garden statue of Leda and the Swan. The Aske Hall version is by an unidentified Roman sculptor of the 2nd century AD and it is not known how long he took to complete the work, but we know from our own experience that it’s a long, intricate process. A five ton block of Portland stone (see the photo below) was delivered to us in June 2009 and Alan has been working on it ever since, outside, in all weathers. Each buttock took three months. It would of course have been completed much sooner if Alan hadn’t had a full time teaching job and other commissions to contend with. Ours is entitled Leda and The Golden Swan, the gold being calculated to bring prosperity to the inhabitants of Yewbarrow House. The finished product is, to my mind, every bit as beautiful as the Aske Hall version, but we’ll have to wait until after I’m gone and my rapacious descendants consign it to the auction house before we discover if it’s worth £12.2 million. In the meantime, it will sit under the stone arch at the end of our drive, providing an intriguing focal point as you enter the garden.

“Hotlips” Houlihan got her nickname when she was having sex with Frank, unaware that a microphone for the public address system had been placed under her bed, so that everyone at the MASH camp heard her say “Kiss my hot lips, Frank”.  Until recently Houlihan was the best known “Hotlips” on the planet, but her place has now been usurped by the variety of Salvia Macrophyllia, which is named, (apparently) after the sexy Mexican maid who introduced it into California.  It only reached my garden this year, courtesy of Cath’s Garden Plants.  A small, inexpensive, plant soon bulked up into the one shown below, and flowered continuously from June to November.  A real star.
​
​But the accolade for the best new introduction into my garden goes to the maple shown above.  It’s the Acer palmatum ‘Sango-Kaku’.  I bought two examples in May from Larch Cottages Nursery in Melkinthorpe, (see here) and it looked so spectacular once in the ground that I went back a couple of weeks later and bought two more.  

We have no way of knowing for certain what greenhouses there were in our kitchen garden in Victorian times, but there are some telling clues.  There’s a boiler house for a start, and traces of some substantial iron heating pipes, which seem to have run all the way along the south-east facing wall at the rear of the kitchen garden.  A second wall, about ten feet high runs parallel behind it, and seems to have been used for espalier fruit trees, probably apricots.  ​