Our first day with my Mum and Dad has been a really exciting one in all sorts of ways. We’ve been able to show off our new home AKA ‘The Money Pit’ as I suspect it will become known and the verdict from them is a lovely clean slate to develop as time goes on. They love the house (so that gives me a bit of courage and hope for our future here) and the garden too, in fact, they’ve been able to identify some of the unknown twigs that are the dormant shrubs in the garden. The best bit of that for me is that many of them are hardy fuchsias (they’re experts on fuchsias, having had a life-long love of the species) and I love them too so to find we have a garden full of them (as well as all of the camellias and other stuff we know about) is a real bonus.

While showing them around the garden, I noticed that our pond, which is leaking like a sieve, looks like either Quatermass or a huge bowl of tapioca pudding dependent on your point of view. It’s chock full of spawn – both frog and toad. I am thrilled that we will soon become ‘parents’ to a mass of tadpoles!!! What a thrill. They’ll help the hens to keep down the slugs and snails….that’s if the hens don’t get the baby frogs first!

Trying to cram in as many treats (and inducements for them to return soon), we’ve no sooner got them settled in than we’ve carted them off to Eden. My folks are ‘the good guys’ and we’re showing them the work of a group of other ‘good guys’ when we’re there.

It’s one of those places that I can’t get enough of because the more I go, the more I realise it’s continually changing and I’m spotting stuff I’ve not seen before. These grasses are part of the ever-changing world of the temperate zone. This zone seems to change more dramatically than the tropical zone partly because they change the planting with the seasons, whereas the tropical zone seems to be more-or-less permanently planted.

It’s not just the love of horticulture that drives us back to Eden so often, it’s also a real desire to support their environmental programme. I love the fact they use rainwater to flush the loos and local produce in the cafes – not to mention the plethora of environmentally aware products in their shop. I learned yet another new fact today because of them and it’s one that’s a particular bug-bear of mine – I hate microwaves anyway and we don’t actually have one here. Do you know that their digital clocks use more energy than the average microwave uses to cook with across its entire lifetime? Why they can’t have mechanical timers is a mystery to me and always has been and this just confirms my cynicism about their worth as a kitchen gadget.

Last year we were at Crantock.....again!