It’s that time of year again — my mum is opening her garden again for the National Garden Scheme  ’Yellow Book’ on Sunday May 12th . It’s a fabulous garden on the side of Bulbarrow Hill (where Jack Rosenblum built his golf course…) and is looking particularly splendid this year.

Pop along between 2-5pm to ‘The Old Smithy’, Ibberton, nr Blandford Forum, Dorset Dt110EN. There will be tea in the village hall. Little S and I will be there. Do not ask us anything about plants. We will not know the answer. Though, Little S does like to try and eat dandelions.

Mrs S, Little S

I have a small confession to make. You may have noticed that I’ve been rather tardy in the blogosphere over the last year and I do have a small excuse. Little S arrived in the world in the summer and has been keeping Mr S and I rather busy. He was very considerate and delayed his appearance until the first draft of ‘The Gallery of Vanished Husbands’ was (just about) finished. I’m still learning to balance motherhood with writing, and editing with games of peekaboo and the requisite cake eating.

On that note, I’ve had two coffee shop encounters in the last couple of months which have ended up with me explaining to the other (marginally baffled) cake-lovers why they must leave London and live amongst the cows in the land of ginger biscuits and sticky mud. So far, it’s been quite successful, charming couple no 1 have indeed moved here (well, Somerset, but it’s right on the border) and I’m still working on the others… If you spy me over the Battenberg, and you don’t want to be my new neighbour, just walk swiftly by. I can be very persuasive.

In case you want to be tempted, here is a view from a recent walk. It might be damp but it’s still beautiful…

Rainbow over Bulbarrow

Mr S and I have now moved to our new home. It’s the wettest summer ever, but that does make for the odd rainbow. We don’t have anything fancy like curtains yet, so dawn (and next door’s cockerel) wakes us and we watch the morning light rise behind the hill.

At my desk I’m busy finishing the new book which is called ‘The Gallery of Vanished Husbands’. It’s coming along nicely and I’m managing not to be too distracted by the arrival of things like a custom dresser for the kitchen. When I say ‘custom’, I mean we found it in a vintage market in Bridport, and when it was delivered discovered that our measurements were off by about 4inches. The bottom had to be sawn off – so now it fits perfectly.

So, I’m playing house in the real world and in my imagination…

garden at the Old Smithy

bog garden towards church

My mum, Carol, is a fantastic and passionate gardener, and it’s she who helps me with all horticultural references in my books. I love writing about nature but without a little nudge my peonies would be blooming alongside my primroses, and my lilac would be lovely in July. (Yes, I felt you gardeners shudder).

Sadie’s garden in ‘Mr R’ is inspired by  Carol’s (though Sadie is far more tolerant of weeds and don’t even ask what Carol does to the deer who dare to eat her roses). I’ve watched as over a decade my parents have turned a couple of fields into an idyllic English cottage garden. There is a riotous herbaceous border filled with giant alliums (mum calls them ‘space rockets’), poppies, hellebores, irises, lilies, roses, daisies, lupins and wigwams of Carol’s prized sweat-peas. The striped lawns roll down to a stream, and a bridge leads to a series of bog gardens and ponds — one white, one yellow, one blue — and paths lined with towering bamboo snake to a bench beneath a willow arbour.

Beyond the bog gardens and stream is a field full of grass and wild flowers through which my dad, Clive, has carefully mown a series of paths. There are plantings of young trees — fruit trees and hard wood — and at the bottom lies the grandchildren’s pride: a secluded tree house. And, I can’t possibly discuss the garden without mentioning my dad’s favourite part of the garden: the veg patch. During the summer we enjoy his courgette flower risotto, lettuce plucked straight from the ground as well as home grown strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, black-currants…

From the garden you can see both the thatched cottage which inspired Jack and Sadie’s home as well as Bulbarrow hill. If you have enough cider, you might even see the flags of Jack’s golf course or the tail of a woolly-pig.

For two days this summer Carol and Clive are opening the garden as part of the National Garden’s scheme and are featured in The Yellow Book (if you don’t know what the yellow book is, just make sure you say it in hushed and reverent tones).

‘The Old Smithy’ garden, Ibberton, Dorset,  is open on Sunday 27th of June between 2-5.30pm. Admission is £3 (children free) and all proceeds go to charity. There are plants for sale and cream teas will be served at Ibberton Village Hall. The postcode for your sat nav is DT11 0EN

I will be there collecting tickets and failing to answer questions about plants.

Leave a comment below if you need further details.

This picture isn't of Tyneford but Kingston Lacey in Dorset... it's rather grander than Tyneford would have been....

Welcome to any new blog readers who’ve come by after hearing me on the radio this morning. It’s been quite an adventure. I’m in L.A at the moment and I’ve been up since four this morning talking on various radio shows across the US. I was really nervous at first (and a little sleepy!) but I think I found my rhythm…

It’s lovely to be in L.A — I’m busy working on my new novel and part of it takes place in California so I’m hoping that the sunshine seeps into the story.

I’m going to be doing an event while I’m here at VRomans bookstore in Passadena at 7pm next Wednesday April 4th:

http://www.vromansbookstore.com/natasha-solomons

Jeff Rona, my friend and the lovely composer of ‘The House at Tyneford’ ‘The Novel in the Viola’ music will be there too and the music will be performed live in the US premier! Exciting stuff.

I’m behind in replying to your gorgeous messages but I will try to catch up over the weekend, I so appreciate hearing from you.

We took a trip to Lacocks in Wiltshire and the snowdrops outside the abbey were beautiful and I heard my first wood pigeon of the year. That to me is the first sound of spring.

And in the original photographic studio of Mr Fox Talbot, the inventor of the photographic negative, Mr S took some pictures of me in a rather fetching top hat.

And a big thank to everyone at Plume. ‘The House at Tyneford’ has been in the NYT bestseller list for 6 weeks now and they sent me a beautiful bouquet of flowers. (The gorgeous Rob Ryan vase was a birthday present from Mr S).

I love snowdrops. Just when January seems endless and grey, the snowdrop appear — a magical all day frost. These were taken during an afternoon *ahem* skipping work when Mr S and I went walking at Kingston Lacey. Kingston Lacey is a fabulous country house in North Dorset, a seventeenth century stately home, more palace than manor. I’ve always loved it – especially after I read Viola Banks memoirs of growing up in the house in the ’20s. I read it when I was nine or ten and stomped about the house when we came to visit, pretending I was Viola and wishing that all the pesky tourists would leave me in peace.

In the last few years they’ve been doing lots of work to the gardens – which even in the depths of winter are rather spectacular.

This is the Kingston Lacey version of a summerhouse — the summerhouse itself is quite similare to ours, only the stately mansion behind is a little grander than our cottage/ hovel.

And then walking in the woods on the way to tea (if only every walk had macaroons and cheese scones at the end) Mr S spied this door into a tree and what we can only presume to be a Hobbit Hole.

Here is a photo of a windswept Dorset seascape near Tyneham… no wonder I was inspired to write a novel set here.

Burt's Tyneford cottage

And here is a picture of the real-life Landau girls, taken in Berlin in the 1920s.

Gerda, Gabi, Margot

My grandmother Margot is the eldest.

The US version of ‘The Novel in the Viola’ is now published by Plume and is currently at no 17 on the Indiebound bestseller chart! Hurray. I love, love this cover.

We’ve just ordered our Christmas tree/ Channuka bush from
Bulbarrow Hill, but I’m wondering if we shouldn’t have made one of these instead. Would help with the whole book storage problem…

What books would you like in your book tree? Some of the books I’ve loved this year are: Elif Batuman ‘The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read them’ — part memoir, part surrealist comedy, part literary critique. I loved the atmosphere Andrew Miller’s ‘Pure‘ (a foul smelling fug seemed to hang over me as I read) as well as the language — the things that man can do with a sentence. I adored Alexandra Harris’s ‘Romantic Moderns‘ — a fascinating journey through the first part of this century’s literature and art in Britain as well as an investigation about Englishness itself. I fell in love with Billy Collins through his best of collection ‘Taking Emily Dickinson’s Clothes off’ and now need to read his other poetry books. He combines humour and pathos and the poet’s grasp language — ah shuddering perfection. I read his poem on ‘Marginalia’ at formal hall in Cambridge — these stanzas went down particularly well:

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

(I did not graduate from college without having written man v nature in the margins of several books…)

What did you particularly enjoy this year? Feel free to share in the comments below!