Last weekend I had a wonderful few days with my daughter, she lives about 200 miles away at the moment, she comes up when she can but for various reasons I hadn’t been down there, so it was lovely to see where she lived and have some time together.

The weekend started on Thursday, she bought us tickets to see Shania Twain for my birthday. I made myself a blouse and after chatting to a younger work colleague who went earlier in the week Helen also managed to get some cowboy hats at the last minute…and then we got some twinkly lights to go on them on the stalls outside the arena. We had a fabulous time, here we are just before the concert…

On Friday we drove down to Colchester to her house for the weekend. On Saturday she suggested that we go to Beth Chatto’s garden. I’ve wanted to go for years as it’s quite a famous garden. It’s actually Grade II listed which is pretty rare for a garden. I’d heard about the dry garden which she famously made from a carpark back in the 1960’s, it’s never watered, she just planted plants that like dry conditions.

I didn’t realise however that there’s much more to the gardens, there’s 7 acres altogether with several ponds and beautiful borders. What we particularly liked is that it wasn’t pristine, there were weeds around, she used lots of easily available plants, like verbena, sedum, hydrangeas, there was no neat colour scheme, there were lots of ideas that were usable in the average sized garden…and some amazing vistas…

On Sunday she said we’d have a walk round Dedham. Something about Dedham rang a bell with me but I couldn’t remember what. I asked Helen what was there, oh it’s just a pretty village with a nice walk along the river. It still niggled me when we were having lunch in Dedham, why had I heard about it! We were walking along the river when we came across a National Trust exhibition…about Constable’s Haywain, probably one of the most famous paintings in Britain! It was painted in 1821 at Flatford Mill which is in Dedham!! The painting now hangs in the National Gallery. ‘Who’s Constable’ says my daughter!! Her artistic grandmother would be spinning in her grave!!

Anyway, we could see the spot where Constable painted the Haywain. I was surprised to see it was a dead end of water, I always presumed they were crossing a river, so I’m not sure why they didn’t just go round the end!

On Monday I left my daughters to come home on the train. I travelled via London and met up with two girls I trained as a nurse with, one of whom I hadn’t seen since about 1987!! We shared a flat for a couple of years and it was wonderful to see them both again, lots of reminiscing. We’re hoping to have a reunion early next year as it’ll be 40 years since we started our nurse training.

I was quite exhausted when I finally got back home on Monday night!