We’ve been outside all day today and rightly so given the glorious weather again. In fact, I have managed to get a touch of sunburn from sitting outside a café having lunch.

Our first stop was Rosemoor – truly a place to get inspired. Each time I go there, I come away with some fantastic ideas and some encouragement for the rat’s nest’s garden. There would once have been a time when I was just overwhelmed and disappointed in myself because of my RHS membership.

In the past, I’ve always been to Wisley, walked along the long herbaceous borders and simply felt inadequate through knowing that however long I am a gardener, I can never achieve such beauty. I could never really see how what they did could be translated into smaller spaces really. Of course they do have ‘small gardens’ as displays, but somehow they never struck a chord for me – always too manicured and too perfect. Not the domains of dogs, chickens and a crazy woman who wants to grow vegetables.

Rosemoor is very different because the scale of most of their gardens are right for an ordinary person with a big-ish outdoor space. I have been encouraged to see that my rose garden planting looks right – right spacing between plants, right soil conditioning, though to be fair, if you think of yourself as any kind of gardener at all and you don’t know that ‘muck’ is considered good for roses then you’ve not been listening!

I have been thrilled to bits by their veggie plot – three to four times the size of mine at least, but nonetheless, same sorts of ‘bits’. They’re slightly further on with their garlic and broad beans but they planted theirs last autumn and I wasn’t ready then so mine went in after Christmas. Altogether it was a great morning out.

Then I planted my own potatoes so my inspiration gave me the impetus to do the last ‘big’ job in the veggie garden – by big I mean heavy digging.

Then the three of us (DM, Colin and I) walked over the hill to the pub for dinner and I can honestly say that the walk was so perfect that it’s hard to imagine being in a better place. Lambs and calves littered the hillside and we were not so scary as usual because we didn’t have the dogs with us so we got in closer. Golden light, long shadows, views right down to the sea. Bloody perfect.

Sometimes, a day spent fishing for ideas can deliver inspiration in such big quantities that it’s hard to work out how to filter it all and make sense of it.

Bondy was my subject last year, and he was reflecting a glorious day!