Sally-Part 84. ARDWELL HOUSE GARDENS ! A TRULY WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE ! AND THEN ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS GETS IT IN THE NECK !

Reflections in the pond!

Today I discovered the most wonderful garden in the world !

And for once I'm not joking !

It's called ARDWELL HOUSE and it's at the far end of Dumfries and Galloway on the peninsula leading down to The Mull Of Galloway Lighthouse.

The two hundred year old walled garden, dazzling in the late-morning sun and washed by the mild air of the Gulf Stream, was magnificent in it's late summer splendour and it completely captivated the two of us !

Just beautiful !

We walked on it's perfect lawns, ankle deep in peachy softness and loved every plant, flower, apple and butterfly !

If that wasn't enough, there were ponds and lakes in the grounds that simply added to the experience and feeling that we had discovered an absolute jewel !

Old fashioned and perfect !

But perhaps the thing that made it so brilliant is that it wasn't highly groomed and the array of potting sheds and greenhouses, plants for sale, great swollen bunches of black grapes, packets of seeds lying on benches, trowels, compost and loads of bits and pieces all over the place were all part of something that hit something deep inside!

I found one on the ground and it fell into my pocket !

I think that I rediscovered the magic of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men from my babyhood !

We both kept saying, " Have you seen this ? "

There was one young woman working like a Trojan and one man cutting the lawns in the grounds.

I'm going back next week with my proper camera to get some more pics !

If only these two have managed to produce and maintain this masterpiece then they should receive the highest accolades that the gardening world has to offer !

Now in complete and total contrast to this, we then visited a local Royal Botanic Garden which is regarded as one of the top gardens in the land and found it manicured to death and boring and frankly couldn't wait to get out, especially as the lunch we ate there was so typically mediocre that the eighteen pounds it cost for Parsnip and Apple soup ( Yuk ! ) and a cheese slice toasted to death in a commercial slab wrecked the day !

They enticed us in with an advert for 'Delicious Home-Baked Food' and we fell for it again !

Actually, the soup and cheese toastie was Shirley's choice !

MY original choice was a ham toastie served with onion pickle and a coleslaw salad and which I got one small nibble out of before Shirley thought that I would prefer hers !

Apparently I agreed and so I walked around the garden with a hard-to-digest concrete lump pressing uncomfortably on the top of my large intestine, not helped by most of a lemon meringue pie with double cream that Shirley had set her heart on but which was thankfully too sweet for her !

As we drove home after visiting the stunningly positioned lighthouse standing three hundred feet above the ocean with views over to Ireland and The Isle Of Man, I wondered who had had the great idea of building it there !

That's how thick I am !

What a day, made even better by playing Rufus Wainwright loudly and then, unfortunately, Antony and the Johnsons.

I love Rufus and women love Antony as well, though to tell the truth I don't !

I had to say, because it was true and thankfully Shirley laughed, that much of his falsetto wailing reminded me of the sound I made on the Island of Gomera, South of Tenerife, last January when after treating our friends to a posh buffet in the best hotel on the Island, I retired to bed feeling stuffed and a little queasy.

I awoke suddenly an hour later, in agony and I bet you all know the feeling, only to spend the rest of the night dying in the bathroom, making sounds from both ends only ever heard emanating from the throat of the devil in Hammer Horror Films.

I twice begged my friend Mike, a doctor, to help me but apart from listening to my intestines by resting his ear on my naked abdomen with his head turned towards my feet which made Shirley vomit when she finally woke suddenly and thought an act of gross indecency was taking place between two men on HER bed, he was less than useless as was my wife and every other guest on the complex who as a group pushed a card through the door in the morning congratulating the lady of the apartment on the birth of her child !

And that's what Antony And The Johnsons sounded like to me this evening !

Me on the toilet with severe food poisoning !