Five days before Christmas we moved to a new home with a smaller garden, close to the sea at Aberporth. For twenty years we'd gardened high on a hill on a smallholding in Ceredigion. It was a garden  prone to high winds, heavy frosts and the biggest slugs you ever did see. The summer temperatures varied from zero at night time and 28 during the day and as for the winter - well, it was a lot colder then. This meant we were restricted to what we could grow. I dreamt of tall, stately cottage garden plants like hollyhocks, delphiniums, but I soon learnt that was not be. We made the garden at Ael Y Bryn beautiful but it was big, too big for John and I to manage as we reached our middle years. It was terribly sad to leave it but w e look forward to the challenge of a new, more manageable garden and although we've been here for just six months we are already learning lessons. This new 'easy' garden isn't going to be as straight forward as we thought. When we