Monthly Archives: January 2025

Two great ladies of Eglwysfach

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by The Curious Scribbler

This winter has seen the passing of two remarkable women whose long lives were integral to the the life of Glandyfi and Eglwysfach.  Both created wonderful gardens and also wielded influence far beyond their chosen patch.

Penny Condry, who died aged 102, was the widow of the writer and conservationist Bill Condry, whose Country Diary appeared in the Guardian for more that 40 years until his death in 1998.  It had been the Manchester Guardian when he started writing for them.  In the 1950s he became warden of the RSPB Glandyfi nature reserve, newly created as such thanks to its former owner W.H. Mappin of the jewellery firm Mappin and Webb.  The Condrys moved into the old stone house on the reserve called Ynys Edwin and remained there all their lives.  Not actually an island but one of those rocky outcrops which rise above the low marshland of the Dyfi Estuary.  Here Penny tended a magical private garden.

Bill and Penny Condry at Ynys Edwin in the 1950s. Her favourite photo, reproduced by Jeremy Moore www.talesfromwildwales.co.uk

At the recent memorial in Tabernacle chapel, Machynlleth, many of her friends and relatives ( great nephews and nieces for the most part) reminisced on the welcome which awaited behind the blue front door, the bookish interior, the tea and cake, and solitary beauty of the garden, half a mile down a muddy track, silent but for the birdsong and the rattle of the passing trains.  Long tailed tit nested there, and many of the shrubs and flowers were fragrant and often white.  But Penny was not only a gardener but a formidable botanist and naturalist whose knowledge could be relied upon, and a person who took a very great interest in all the people she met.  Not entirely rooted to her patch, she was a  long-time member of the Cardiganshire Horticultural Society and an expert, second only to John Corfield at identifying plants in other people’s gardens which they visited.

 

Penny Condry( left) and Joy Neal ( right) at the 100th birthday celebrations of the Eglwysfach WI in 2022, which also corresponded with Penny’s hundredth year. (photo: Alison Swanson)

The other lady in the picture is Joy Neal, granddaughter of a distinguished north Cardiganshire family, the Pughs.  Joy’s grandfather Lewis Pugh Evans Pugh built the handsome Victorian gothic mansion of Abermad near Llanilar to house his large family, and then briefly owned Glandyfi Castle before moving to build a new home on land he owned at Cwmerau, and retaining much of the Glandyfi estate.  Joy grew up at Voelas above the road at Glandyfi and remembered a girlhood swimming her pony across the Dyfi at low tide, and droving the family’ cattle across the mountains.  Her cut-glass accent was ensured by her parents’ policy of only ever hiring English nannies.  She  was married young,  to Stewart Neal scion of Daniel Neal’s, the London children’s outfitter which was later taken over by John Lewis Partnership.  After a busy life in England they retired to what had been her mother’s house, Llwyncelyn,  and the garden which she created became the highlight of the National Garden Scheme Open Days in West Wales.   It also starred on Gardener’s World.  Driving north through Glandyfi in summer one passes the entrance drive with a neat garage just inside the gate, and  a long wall holding back  an overflow of huge Gunnera leaves.  Up the winding drive through woodland one reached the house set in an immaculate garden blending seamlessly into the mossy oak scrub and bluebell wood of the adjoining hillside.  Joy became an expert collector of plants, especially acid-loving shrubs, rare ferns, trilliums, even a collection of eucalyptus.  She was always learning.

Last visitors leaving the NGS Open day at Llwyncelyn in May 2005

She was  a gifted organizer.  In the Cardiganshire Horticultural Society in the 1990s she pioneered and led an annual summer excursion visiting gardens of note.  In the old-fashioned amateur tradition which has since been extinguished by regulation, Joy would organize CHS coach visits as far afield as France, Belgium, Italy and Madeira as well as to Scotland, Ireland and many parts of England.  She would research and select the gardens we visited. Thanks to her Pugh grandfather’s ten offspring she seemed to have a well-heeled cousin wherever we went.  One trip saw her lead her motley society for a slap-up free lunch in the chateau of yet another cousin and a leisurely stroll around their estate.

Eglwsfach has Joy Neal to thank for organizing the restoration of the Iron Room, a listed corrugated church hall and for creating the RS Thomas Festival which has run there every second year since 2008.  Need an archbishop to address the company ( and also call the raffle)?  Joy’s charm and confidence would achieve it effortlessly.  In her eighties she became Vice Chairman of the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust and an indefatigable fundraiser for its charitable objectives.

Joy Neal, ( right) at a fundraiser for WHGT, modelling hats at the Conrah Country Hotel

Only in the last few years did poor health slow her down and she died aged 95 just after Christmas.  Her memorial will be held at St Michael’s Eglwsfach next Saturday.  Neither Penny Condry nor Joy Neal had been to university or held any higher qualifications, but they were two of the most capable and knowledgeable people one could hope to meet.

 

Hair Ice at Hafod

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by The Curious Scribbler

The old carriage drive on the Gorge walk at Hafod

The Second of January 2025 served up a perfectly clear and ferociously cold day at Hafod.  The rivers were  gushing with clear water draining from the sodden uplands, and the overnight rain remained as frozen ice droplets on the fine twigs of the birch trees.  Out of direct sunlight they remained stuck like jewels, while where to sun penetrated they gradually melted and dripped to the forest floor.  It was here that I was privileged to find that rarest of phenomena  Hair Ice.

Hair ice sprouting from a dead bough on the forest floor at Hafod

There was no snow on the ground, but here and there among the brown leaf mould and green moss one could see bright  strands of white.  At a distance they looked more like a sparing litter of  elongated white scraps of Kleenex discarded by a careless hiker.   On closer inspection these proved to be a thick growth of delicate hairs of ice, sprouting from pieces of thin  dead branches on the forest floor.  The ice forces outward from the bare dead wood.   The twigs thus decorated are never conifer twigs but always fragments of oak, birch and beech.

Hair ice at least a centimeter long prizing the bark off a dead branch

Very specific conditions of moisture and temperature are necessary to this occurrence, and the precise explanation has only be elucidated by researchers in the last ten years.  A necessary ingredient for hair ice formation is that the dead deciduous twig should be very damp and also infected with a fungus Exidiopsis effusa.  Only in the presence of the mycelium of this species of fungus does hair ice form.  Each strand, about 0.2 of  a mm in diameter freezes as it is extruded from the damp wood, and the lignin and tannin freed by the action of the fungus are necessary to the formation of hair ice.  The ice-like fur more than an inch long had grown during cold humid night exerting force sufficient to lift away chunks of bark from the substrate.

The Hafod Gorge viewed from the Gothic Arcade

The Hafod Gorge below the Gothic Arcade

Hair ice covering an rotten twig on the path

It is a winter treat to find Hair Ice, and pleasing to be able to understand the conditions which produce it.  Another curious piece of winter magic is Star Jelly, which people find and marvel at every winter, strange blobs of clear jelly often lodged as if it had fallen among coarse meadow grass.

Star Jelly – is it Crystal Brain Fungus or regurgitated frog spawn?

Here science has yet to provide a convincing explanation.  Some like to think it is a fungus, others that it is the regurgitated jelly of frog spawn sicked up by herons or crows which had eaten a frog.  But the scientists have failed to find frog DNA, or even identifiable cells within the jelly.   An unsolved mystery as yet..