It has been scorching for weeks. Yes, weeks, not days. We are having a proper summer. Where you wake up every day and know you can eat breakfast outside, but have to get stuff done before 9am because then it will be too hot to move. Phlox is loving it. As I was standing here,…
Category: Bright Border
The Morning Mist
It has been a scorching couple of weeks. It has been five weeks since our last rainfall. Then yesterday the heavens opened. I was driving home under the raincloud, hoping it would come with me all the way home. It did, and the garden got a much-needed drenching for twenty minutes. The temperature didn’t drop,…
Refresh! How to water well
When most people around the world think of England, they think it rains all the time. In my part of the world, in Kent, (Down South), our average yearly rainfall is 650mm. Admittedly, in my hometown of Holmfirth, Yorkshire, (Up North*), it is 1,000mm (figures from Met Office). But compare that to Sydney, which has an…
Roses in the Bright Border
I am sorry to those who are not rose fans, but this is my time. After June the roses will not be so prominent in the garden, and I will stop bombarding you with rose posts. But for now, indulge me. I thought I would write a post about the three roses I grow in…
A different angle
Summer is really for just enjoying the garden. There are minor chores, if you want to call them that, but really these a pretty pleasurable: deadheading, tying in a tendril here, pulling out a weed there, eating a strawberry, sniffing a rose. I do a lot of basking. We can call it mindfulness if you…
The View from a Sunlounger
Stevie and I had Saturday evening to ourselves. This is the view from our sunloungers. We’re sitting under the lime tree, which Stevie has cunningly pruned so it has an umbrella-like canopy. In fact, like a living yurt. If we sit in the shade, we can look through its hanging fronds. We debated going out…
Celebration!
These are the flowers picked from the garden for our Royal Wedding Party on Saturday. I had a lot of fun arranging them. My daughters made this bunting: And my lovely friend Clare leant me hers: My equally scrumptious friend Shelley made this: My eldest made these sweet little flags for the food: Our friends…
Knitting together nicely
On days when I am not working, I like to get up early and have a little quiet wander around the garden. The dogs come with me, and we have a good sniff around. I thought you might like to come with me this morning. Let’s start with the rose garden. This is my absolute…
Lighting the Touch-Paper in the Bright Border
The Bright Border has taken a while to ignite this Spring, but today, I think it took off. This border is not for the faint-hearted. It is fiery and fiesty; invigorating, rather than relaxing. Here are two of the euphorbias, E. amygdaoides var. robbiae, [health warning here] and E. griffithii ‘Fireglow’: ‘Fireglow’ deserves a close-up: And so does Euphorbia…
The Bigger Picture
I tend to favour close-ups of flowers, but this week I thought I’d try to do a more practical post, with an overview of different areas of the garden. Apologies for naming different areas of the garden, but it does help when Stevie and I are explaining to one another which area we are planning…
We’re on a break.
You meet. Your eyes lock, you catch your breath a little as your heart skips a beat. You look away, flustered. You look back. Falling in love with a flower can be a heady experience. And this is what happened with me and Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’. I loved everything about it. The frilly flamenco skirts…
Key plants in the bright border
This is a companion piece to The Big Bang: the making of a bright border. These are the key plants that make up the display in my bright border. First there are the tulips: ‘Couleur Cardinal’, ‘Antraciet’, ‘Ballerina’ and ‘Purple Flame’. They are accompanied by Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ and Geum ‘Hilltop Beacon’ and new spikes of hemerocallis…
