Britt-Arnhild's House in the Woods

After the rain

@brittarnhild

We are used to a lot of rain during our summers, but ever since we came back from Paris it has been dry, warm and sunny. Which has meant spending my nights watering the garden. Some nights for hours.

I love the job, but I also want to do other things at night :-)

This afternoon a wet thunderstorm passed over our area. No damage done, but my job was effectively done.

No watering tonight.
Instead I am knitting. And enjoying the most wonderful smell which is filling the house, as Terje is cleaning the wild blueberries he picked up in the forest behind our house yesterday.

 

 

.....................and the knitting?
Well, it will soon be a new post in maskerade.

 

 

To name a rose

@brittarnhild

Roses are blooming in my garden.
I don´t remember the name of this one, which I have had for years and years. So I decided to baptise it. And since two days ago was St. Olav´s day, and since we are in the middle of the St.Olav Festival, I gave it the name Helligolav (St.Olav)

 

You can read more about the festival here

and about my garden here

 

The challenge of growing cabin roses

@brittarnhild

We took over the cabin at Easter 2000 (my parents had built it in 1976) and one of the first things I started to do was to make a garden. Very slowly in the beginning, a tiny little bed with a tiny little rose.

Already the first year I met the challenge.....how could I take care of a garden when we were away for weeks at a time during the hottest, dryest periods of the year.

Over the hears the garden has grown, a little piece of new land cultivated every year.

The cabin garden is simple, consisting of roses and herbs, and also one cherry tree, one plum tree and one red currant. A few strawberry plants, a forsythia shrub and a few perennials.

The birds love our cherries, our red currant and our strawberries. So far we´ve had no plums.

We love the birds and don´t mind them eating our berries.

Butterflies and bumblebees also love my garden, and we love them.

This year has been extra challenging for the garden. We´ve been away for weeks, and it did not rain for weeks.

All the roses have survived, but their flowers are tiny and few.

 

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We are spending a few days at the cabin, and yesterday I spent a couple of hours weeding, watering, adding fertilizer, talking with the plants. And one thing I know for sure - as long as I am fit enough to weed, my cabin rose garden will survive!

 

Roses and Memories

@brittarnhild

The hill which is folding out in front of the cabin is painted red, pink, lilac and purple these days. Roses and heather. God has been very generous with paints from his paintbox.

A few years ago we planted a couple of wild roses among the cultivated ones. I was dreaming of huge trees with pink roses, and hips in the late summer which I would make into marmelade.
The wild ones never thrived and yesterday we removed them and planted two new ones. One red. One pink.

A teenager summer love.
We met at a camp in the begiining of summer. We lived far away from each other. Train stations were our places for goodbyes, and for new meetings. The first time I had his blue and white sweather around my neck and forgot to give it back. I slept with the sweather as my pillow for weeks, breathing in my love.  In the middle of summer he came to visit me. I walked down to the railway station to meet him and I got my first kiss. Later I took the train south to visit him. When I left to go home, his mother filled my arms with roses from their garden. I sat on the train for hours with the roses in my lap, watering them with my tears. Not long afterwards I broke up. Not because of the roses.

I had white roses in my bridal bouquet.

We all have rose tales. Bouquets of them. Armfuls of them.
Do you have one to share?

Terje is not the world champion in giving me flowers,
that is not one of the 1001 reasons I love him,

but I remember the day my book was published, he bought me a huge bouquet of red roses. 

 

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Thank you Julia for your rose tale,
the man who makes roses 

Cabin roses almost in bloom

@brittarnhild

I am at the cabin together with my parents.
They bought this land back in 1975 and built the cabin the next summer.
In 2000 Terje and I bought both the land and the cabin from them.

Now it is two years since last time they visited.
So much to see again, so much to remember, so much to talk about.

The roses started to bloom these days.....almost.

 

 

The perfect time for a cabin weekend.

Though I wish I had a couple of weeks, not only a couple of days.......

I never promised you a rose garden

text and images britt-arnhild

All my life I have dreamed of my own rose garden.

In my childhood garden my parents gave me a flowerbed of my own, and the crown in the jewel there was a huge Peace rose. It bloomed like magic every sommer. Especially when we were away travelling the world. One year, when we came home from one of our many travels, a neighbour came over to tell us that she had counted more than 100 roses on my bush!

That 100+ roses Peace rose was the peak of my life as a rose gardener.

A rose garden up north here we live, where the summers are short, and often cold and wet, is not an easy task. Not at all.

I never give up though.
Every winter some of my roses dies.
Every year I plant new ones.

And every year a few survive :-)

Today has been a beautiful, sunny day.

And my roses are lovely.

I was wandering around in the garden,
chatting with the plants,
smelling their fragrance,
enjoying their shapes and colours,
watering......

..... when I found it was the perfect hour for photographing.

A rose garden at Huseby (outside Trondheim, where The House in the Woods and The Blue Garden is situated) will never be The Perfect Garden.

It will always be My Perfect Garden thought.
And that´s what counts.

Isn´t it?

 

Defeated

Text and images Britt-Arnhild Wigum Lindland

 
Defeated by rain.

Last night we looked at each other and exclaimed - enough is enough!

Then we packed our bags and drove the two hours back to Trondheim.

 
Still raining today.....but in this weather I prefere The House in the Woods to the cabin....

......and we will have so much fun to do indoors today making the last plans for Jane and Lanny's visit (blogreaders/friends from California)

 
By the way Jane and Lanny, there are bad floodings sout of us, between Trondheim and Oslo. Roads and railway closed. I will write you more in an email (it should still be okay for you to arrive here in Friday, somehow :-))

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Photos: roses at the cabin two years ago

Kissed by the sun, and a coffee tale about the old king.

It might have been one of the last, really warm days this summer. I was up early as usual and out in the garden with my camera. To enjoy the roses, they were kissed by the morning sun, embraced by morning shadows.

A good thing about living in a Nordic garden is that the roses come late. And last long.......

The days are not so long any more as they are around midsummer. Darkness comes at night, the mornings are still bright though. Breakfast out in The Blue Garden every day.

Among the roses, the lavender and the bumblebees.

I drink tea for breakfast, but a little later I make a pot of coffee, for Terje and me. And I read again, and again, and again the coffee tales from Bosnian Coffee.

I read again about  Caterina's Norwegian grandfather Thorvald, and his way of drinkning coffee, may be not the most polite way......... and a story comes to my mind:

The late King of Norway, King Olav V was out in his kingdom visiting its people. One day he was invited to drink coffee with an old man, an old "Thorvald". The old man's coffee was hot, it burnt his lips, and like he always did, he poured some on the saucer and drank it from there. It took the king no blink of his eye to do the same, pour some of his coffee on the saucer, drinking it. The story doesn't tell, but I am sure both men sipped coffee through their sugar cubs as well.

   King Olav V was a beloved king. His death started the tradition with lighting candles to show your grief.

The area in front of the King's Castle in Oslo on the evening and night of January 18. 1991 was an ocean of burning candles. No Norwegian will ever forget.

A coffee story book Caterina? In a way I have already started one, in my blog Caffe Avec. It doesn't have many readers yet though, so it is kind of a secret :-)

If you go there you will find the Bosnian Coffee post on top, but scroll down and there will be a lot of coffee and travel tales.

 
So keep the coffee tales coming. I am collecting them. And who knows what will happen.......some day.......

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Here is a coffe tale of mine, from Venezia of course :-)

By the way, the Queen of Coffee tales is Merisi from Vienna for Beginners. You find her blog here.   

 

 

Four Times!

 
Yesterday I took time off! Slept on the sofa four (!!!!) times.

Today I feel almost human again.

It is Sunday, the sun is shining, I woke at 5.40am to a fantastic sunrise. I am going out into the countryside to a youth meeting and I am bringing my camera.

May be there will be some good shoots for Britt-Arnhild's House in the Woods?

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Photos are from our cabin, last summer. 

Fully recovered, and food redesigned .-)

The three long naps on the coach on Saturday, and an eleven hours sleep during the night from Saturday till Sunday, did wonders. I am fully recovered. I had a great Sunday. I am looking forward to a full week at work, ending with the week-end in Copenhagen for the climate meeting.

I started the Sunday with a garden walk, after breakfast, as soon as it was light enough. Not much to see now when everything is frosen, but the walk was a good one for planning what to do in the garden next spring, next summer.

Terje and Marta kept on with their Christmas cookies. Marta's singing, father and daughter's chatting could be heard from where I sat at the diningroom table, writing the Christmas letter of 2009.

Saturday I had invited the kids home for a fish dinner. Yesterday it was time to do something with the leftovers. Redesign the food. We have used leftovers always, nothing is ever thrown away in The House in the Woods. I'd never heard of redesigned food though, untill a friend wrote about it on facebook not long ago.

Redesigned food. Sounds quite chic :-)

I decided to make a fish soup. Having observed my father in law so many times, having some ideas of my own. The soup turned out to be a winner. Bjørn Amundsen, my friend who has written the book " Jorda rundt på 80 fiskesupper" (around the world on 80 fish soups), had his birthday yesterday. I could send him a facebook greeting telling him that I ate some extra soup just for him. And I had to promise him the recipe.

 
I plan to have the recipe up in the new The Blue Café as soon as it opens. The old one, over at blogspot, has been closed for some time now, a new one here at typepad will open some time, hopefully soon. Why don't you visit my other blogs while waiting; Trondheim Through all Seasons, My Year in the World, The Blue Garden, The Blue Bookshelf, they are all active these days. Caffe Avec has a little break but will be updated soon, I have an exciting coffeeshop-visit in Mexico City in mind.

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I got a surprise in my mailbox the other day, an email from Linda Olsson, the author of Astrid & Veronica (Let me Sing you Gentle Songs) and Sonata for Miriam. I wrote about her books some time ago, when I was in Krakow, and now she wrote a thank you note :-) Through her email I discovered that Linda has a blog:

Linda Olsson

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The knitted ornament giveaway will continue every day during advent. Don't forget to leave a comment on this post, tomorrow another name will be drawn.

 

Today's winner: Marilyn