Sunshine and showers

Members enjoying the Sawyers' garden.

The wide orbit of the Oxford & District AGS Group took members this afternoon to the garden of Celia and Walter Sawyer, just over the county border at Long Compton in Warwickshire, for our Conversazione. The garden was looking beautiful in the sunshine, but dark clouds gathered and a sharp shower drove everyone indoors for tea (with delicious edibles provided by the committee). At Colesbourne, shower followed shower and wrecked the fete, but for us the sun returned and the rest of the programme - perhaps the most important part, the plant sale - went ahead in dry bright conditions.

Osteospermum and Euphorbia in the gravel around the house.

On the way home we took the opportunity to visit the nearby Rollright Stones, a Neolithic stone circle and its outliers, now rather hemmed-in by a scrappy plantation that obscures the effect it must have had when situated in open countryside with a vast view across the northern Cotswolds. The King Stone, north of the circle, is a monolith situated on a large tumulus and brings to mind Matthew Arnold's lines in Sohrab and Rustum:

The King Stone

And thou must lay me in that lovely earth,

And heap a stately mound above my bones,

And plant a far-seen pillar over all:

That so the passing horseman on the waste

May see my tomb a great way off...

And I be not forgotten in my grave.