November GBBD – from a stormy London

It’s middle of November and our stormy season has just started, bang on schedule – with Storm Abigail. Here in London we have only noticed the storm as rather windy weather but spare a thought for Scotland where especially on the western side they had winds up to 80 miles per hour (128 km/h or about 70 knots). And only 12 hours after Abigail left, the remnants of Hurricane Kate is right now hitting our shores, dumping unusually high amounts of rain on us. Some places in Britain we can expect up to 250mmm of rain in 36 hours with subsequent flooding. Living here in London I feel rather lucky, sheltered from the worst of the weather, be it snow, rain, storms and flooding. The 10 minutes hailstorm I watched from my window yesterday seemed more like a curiosity and didn’t do any damage. And although it has been raining hard today there is no risk of flooding and the free water from above is just welcome in my garden.

Greeting cards in the post

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about my new online art gallery, inviting all my readers to come for a viewing on my opening day. Some of you took up that invitation and I have had some very nice and positive feedback and comments. One thing I could not tell you about in my original post was the quality of the prints from the company where I have my pictures stored, as I had not yet received my first order. That order has now arrived so please read on!

You are cordially invited!

The last 2 weeks I have been hinting about an announcement I am about to make, and today is the day! I have been working flat out to get everything ready, invitations are sent out to everyone I have an email address for, and all the rest of you get your invitation like this, via my blog.

Dreaming of spring

I am continuing my re-run of elements from posts from early 2011, when my blog was in its infancy and I didn't have that many visitors. I had no idea in the beginning about how to attract visitors and how effective it can be to leave comments on other people’s blogs in order to get traffic to your own blog. Well, I have had to learn a lot, like with most things – by trial and error and by long nights reading on the Internet :-)

Snow in London!

We got our forecasted snow yesterday, here in East London we got around 2 inches, other parts of the South East got up to 6 inches and other parts of the country got a lot more – from 10 to 12 inches. The usual chaos followed with over 3000 schools closed, trains delayed and cancelled, planes delayed and cancelled and many people sitting in cues for hours in their cars on  impassable roads waiting for gritting to be done. Everything is just as it always is here in Britain with a tiny bit of snow: chaos!

January in London

It’s that time again, the 15th of the month, when we gardeners show off our gardens – and all our beautiful flowers. So you’d probably think you could run quickly past a garden from London then, not much in flower at this time of year you might think, but hang on, I’ve got flowers, lots of flowers, come and have a look!

Plans for my corner

Once upon a time I had a nice Holly tree in my garden, it wasn’t that big when I moved in here 11 years ago, but Holly trees are relatively fast growers and mine was no exception. By this summer it had a healthy height of around 8 metres.

Will it ever stop raining??

I am still on the mend from my pancreatitis last month, taking it easy, sleeping a lot, not doing much and my garden is pretty much taking care of itself these days. Fortunately I guess, the rain has come back; we have had so much rain that the hosepipe ban we were threatened to have to struggle with until Christmas now is likely to be lifted within the next month or so. Good for the water reservoirs, good for our gardens, not so good for sun thirsty people of Britain.

My Blog-in-a-book has arrived!

My Blog-in-a-book came in the post from the printers today! I can’t tell you how exciting it is to finally see my own product presented in a book. I have been posting things on the Internet since 1999, starting with the very first baby steps I took playing with web design and graphic design back then and although I now, 13 years later have many more people visiting my website than I could ever imagine, and same goes for my blog for that matter – my books still stands for something special to me.

Another of my Garden Books

It is Garden Book Review again over at Roses and Other Gardening Joys. This meme was started in January and attracted 16 bloggers last month, who posted reviews of “any book about gardening, gardens, or books that has a garden influence in it.”

One of my Garden Books

Here in the Blogger Community it is common practice to start so-called memes. Now, you might not be familiar with the term, even if you have seen and perhaps even participated in memes in the past; you might even have started your own meme at some point. Anyway, I am joining another meme today, and I thought I would spend a few moments explaining what a meme is, and where the word comes from.

15.11. Christmas Cards 2011

Most of my family and friends live abroad, and the last day for posting parcels to reach them in time for Christmas is 12th December. Yesterday it was 4 weeks left, and I know how quickly those weeks fly by, so I have spent the last few days making this year’s Christmas cards. I still have a few presents to buy, but most of them are already bought, I usually start in September so I can spread the cost over several months.

05.03. More famous quotes

Hi, I thought I would share some more quotes with you today, I haven’t done that for a while. I collect quotes and aphorisms I find and write them down for later use, and I especially like those where the person who said it can be added to the saying; it makes the quote so much more meaningful. Sometimes I use the quotes I find on the greeting cards I make, you can see them on my web-site and download as many as you like for free, as long as the cards are not copied or downloaded for commercial use. Feel free to print and give the cards away, you can FIND THE GREETING CARDS HERE :-) I haven’t got any good photos to go with today’s topic, but since I already have mentioned my greeting cards I thought I would spread a few of them

15.01. It's not raining!

It’s not raining today! Yeah! Well, small things make me happy :-) I have been outside in my garden for over 2 hours today, clearing up mostly, and I have managed to get almost half of the long beds done. I have taken out dead twigs and leaves from last year’s plants, and thrown away all the other strange things I find in my flower beds. Today I found: 4 vertebrae of different sizes from an animal that can only be a cow or something of similar dimension...don’t ask me how the cow got in my garden...I assume it didn’t climb over and die here, I haven’t found any other leftovers...so I guess I have to blame those bloody foxes again, for dragging their dinner into my garden. Somewhere in the neighbourhood, someone is either feeding the foxes or being rather casual with their rubbish. I also found two cable ties, something I find quite often in my garden; usually the ones made of metal, but today they were black plastic. It is the birds that bring them into the garden, they use them to build

04.01. A creative day

I am constantly doing things I don't know how to do, that's how I learn how to do them. That's how I have learned to do most things I am doing these days, at least anything involving a microchip - which would be most of the electronic equipments in my house. No, this is not going to be a follow-up of yesterday's post about gadgets, I am just reflecting on what I have been doing today...I have done something I didn’t know how to do; I wanted to embed a slideshow of photos into a post here, and when I started out I had no idea of how to do that, didn’t even know if it was possible, and it has taken me quite a few hours to first sort out a suitable slideshow...for which there are hundreds and hundreds of on the Internet, most of them require a fee of some sort, but a few are completely free of charge. I found one eventually which I downloaded the template for, found some suitable photos on my computer, made the slideshow...and then I got to the difficult bit: how to embed the slideshow into this