Sunday, June 21st 2026

Following the unbearable sadness of losing Peonie, I wanted a new black cat to fill the hole as soon as possible and ease the pain. After all, a black cat is part of Bressenden’s identity. We’ve had black cats here for many decades. I found a delightful, impeccably behaved little one-year-old at an organisation called Wisteria Cat Rescue in Rochester. I went to fetch her yesterday and she is settling in remarkably quickly. Her given name wasn’t really what we would want to call her so I tried hard to think of a name that was similar enough to Peonie that I would keep her memory alive at the same time as acknowledging a new cat’s personality. I couldn’t think of anything suitable, and then it came upon me quite suddenly as I walked in the woods. Just one letter different, and highly appropriate with its French connotation of lioness.

Tuesday, June 16th, 2026

Today we said goodbye to my sweet little black cat, Peonie. She fell ill during the recent heatwave last month, while the peonies were in full bloom. After many attempts to reduce her fever and get her eating again, and following multiple tests, it was clear that she had several health problems that were not going to be easy, if even possible, to fix. She had a lovely last afternoon out in the sun, and a lick of custard from my pudding bowl, her favourite evening treat. Next morning, with medication still not working, she was further examined under sedation at the vet. What they found there enabled us to decide that the kindest thing for her would be to not let her wake up again.

It is such a shame for this to have happened after she made such a remarkable recovery from having had her leg shattered in a multitude of pieces by a vehicle last March. After a long rehabilitation in a pink cage, by August she was running around indoors and outdoors on all fours and no one would ever have known that her leg was full of metal screws and plates.

Peonie came to us in 2015 to join ginger Georgie (who is now bereft). She oversaw the two-year conversion of the house to B&B accommodation and has greeted hundreds of guests in the eight ensuing years. She is dearly missed, not least by Georgie. A new kitten or cat will be sought to keep him company as soon as possible. Georgie and Peonie (below) were a truly devoted pair and spent 11 years of their lives together.

Monday, May 18th, 2026

Three hours. That’s all it took to renew the bottom half of the driveway. The men and their heavy equipment arrived at 7:30 and got to work immediately, removing the old surface, laying new a new base foundation and topping it off with a deep layer of tarmac right up to where the gravel starts. At half past ten, it was all done. Barely ten minutes later, the heavens opened. I just had time to chalk up a sign warning drivers not to venture up before having to rush indoors. The surface has to solidify overnight and will be good to use from tomorrow morning.

I’m told the new surface should last for thirty to forty years. This work was certainly overdue as the poor driveway has taking a hard beating over the past few years while various building works and renovations were taking place. Central heating oil always used to be delivered in smaller trucks on request, but these days we are never offered the choice, and those enormous trucks are largely responsible for the ever-deepening ruts and depressions, which we’ve been covering up with gravel without getting to the root of the worsening problem. We thought about a patch and repair job, which would involve getting the potholes filled in the same way as the highway agencies fill the holes in the lanes, but we found a local company that gave us a good price for resurfacing the whole thing. This will provide a much smoother experience for us and our guests driving up (the slope is steeper than it looks in this photo). Maintenance will be a lot easier too.

Friday, May 15th, 2026

Mid-May is when the rhododendrons at the peak of their blooming glory. This year, however, we are in the middle of a prolonged cold spell. Nightime temperatures dip to single figures and if the sun hides behind clouds, we’re not getting much above 12 degrees. The incentive to walk around and admire the blooms close up is not so great. Even the cats are demanding to stay indoors away from the chill of the north winds. But at least we can admire these gorgeous flowers through the breakfast room’s windows. Here are some more views of these Himalayan mountain plants.

Saturday, April 18th, 2026

The wisteria usually flowers in May, or occasionally at the end of April. For it come out in mid-April is quite unusual. There are two vines, one on each side of the front door. This one took just a few days to go from bare branches to full blooms. The one on the eastern side always emerges more slowly. The pink shrub at the far end of the photo is an azalea, with a smaller red one a little way to the right and some pink rhododendrons just beginning to flower in the background.

Thursday, April 9th, 2026

This ancient camellia bush was already there when my family moved into this place in 1960. It is hidden away in a corner of the garden that is not very visible unless you go right up to it, which is a shame. These photos were taken on March 30th. I almost missed seeing these perfect and prolific blooms as the second half of March was not a pleasant time to walk around the still water-logged grounds. After its promising first few days, that month soon reverted back to winter and became cold and grey for days on end. But spring must come eventually, and I am writing this a few days after Easter on a glorious day that could easily pass for high summer. Wild flowers are coming up all around in the lanes, and yesterday I counted eleven species in bloom along the banks. Celandine and violets are particularly abundant this year. The birds are enjoying the sudden onset of warm weather too. My Merlin app identified ten species filling the air with song.

Wednesday, March 4th, 2026

This year’s season is certainly getting off to a very lazy start. After a succession of winter months that seemed to have an endless capacity to produce grey, rainy days, during which the cats didn’t want to venture out of doors at all, today we’ve had a glorious spring day full of warming sun, with cheerful daffodils dotted about the garden. The boggy squelchiness of the lawns is finally beginning to change to something a little firmer under foot, and the birds are singing in the tree tops.

In the house, the quiet winter months are a useful time to carry out maintenance, so stained ceilings have been repainted where leaks in the roofs had caused discolouration. The leaks were patched up at the end of autumn. There’s a good reason why ceilings in old houses are traditionally painted white; they certainly get repainted far more frequently than the walls. So with the house looking reasonable once again, after its new windows two years ago and new central heating pipework last year, all we need now is some guests! But with so much uncertainty in the world, and the prospect of further increases in the cost of living becoming more likely with every passing day, I am not optimistic that the 2026 B&B season will be a lucrative one. But whether Bressenden’s guests are sparse or plentiful, they will always be assured of a warm welcome.

Tuesday, December 9th, 2025

I brought down the “tree” from the attic ten days ago, noting that with every passing year the time between packing it away on January 6th and opening the ceiling hatch to bring it down again on December 1st seems to get shorter. A natural tree would be the wrong shape and take up too much space, so I make do with this artificial tree, which has better proportions to fit the available space in the breakfast room. Putting up a conifer indoors to celebrate Christmas is a strange tradition. It is a nice idea in an urban environment where evergreens are in short supply, but here, we look out of the windows and see firs all around us in the garden. A short walk down the path, and we’re inside the woods, surrounded by pines. There’s a Christmas Tree plantation not far away, and Bedgebury Pinetum is a twenty-minute drive away. But this is how everyone decorates their houses, and I’m sure the tradition will go for many more decades and perhaps even centuries.

Sunday, November 16th, 2025

Behind the house is a large area of woodland, which once formed part of Bressenden. The estate was divided up into four separate lots in 1959, so that it would be easier to sell. Lot Number 1, which was bought by my father, consisted of the main house and gardens and a small portion of the woodland. The two staff cottages further up the road were sold as individual dwellings, each with its own small plot of garden and woodland. The rest of the woodland was sold as a single lot and has been privately owned and managed ever since. But it has recently changed hands, having been bought by woodlands.co.uk, and it is in the process of being subdivided into small plots, for resale to multiple owners.

Quite what this implies for the future maintenance  and management of these ancient woods is worrying. More than a dozen separate families will each own a small patch of woodland, and I am sceptical that the majority will have more than minimal experience of woodland ownership and management or will have the inclination to employ qualified tree surgeons if they themselves cannot wield chainsaws. Since those of us with property on the periphery of the woodland already own pieces of it, the newcomers buying up the central portions are unlikely to be living close enough to their patch to monitor their holdings and carry out maintenance. Of particular concern is the maintenance of the tracks. Some of these will be shared, but others will be enclosed within individual parcels. I foresee that the maintenance and upkeep of what used to be wide forest tracks will be minimal at best and non-existent at worst. The tracks will soon become narrow paths with brambles creeping in from both sides and saplings growing in the middle. They will close up and disappear if left unmowed, especially if they are not walked along regularly by humans and animals. This transformation happens incredibly fast. Letting a managed plantation revert to natural, native woodland is a laudable concept in theory, but risky in practice from the point of view of spread of disease due to lack of monitoring, clearance or thinning, and potential fire hazard to those houses on the edge. Maintaining proper fire-breaks needs big machinery to come in and mow them at least once a year and remove fast-growing saplings like birch. This was done religiously by previous managements ever since we came to live here, and rightly so, as fire-breaks are essential in a wood of this size. These woodlands extend along a ridge, which attracts storms. Bressenden was struck by lightning in the early 1940s and almost burned to the ground. Trees in our garden have since been struck. Our increasingly dry, hot summers and the inevitably increasing footfall in these woods are only going to increase the risk, and I can’t say that I welcome this change of use from a fully managed woodland to a minimally managed one now, which could easily become wholly unmanaged when the initial enthusiasm of new owners begins to wane. However, the situation is what it is, and there is not much that one can do other than keep a close eye on what is going on in those woods.

It is easy to forget just how extensive these ancient woods are. They shelter us from noise, pollution and wind. We can sit outside on the terrace during a gale, listen to the roar of the swaying trees that surround us and not feel any movement of air at all. On a more optimistic note, the agents who are preparing the woods for resale have created a rather wonderful bird’s eye video of Bressenden Woods, which includes the photo above. If you want to buy a piece of gorgeous Kentish weald (an Old English word for forest), now’s your chance. But I do hope that you will take on board the responsibilities associated with woodland ownership.