I am mixing my senses here, but I do tend to a degree of synaesthesia when describing colour and its intensity. Whilst supersonic really relates to speed, it is the word that keeps coming to me when I look at these pictures of the bright border and need a word to describe the intensity of…
Category: Colour
A breath of fresh air
Today we were joined by my fabulous step-daughter, K, who is with us for four weeks. She helped me choose the photos for this post, and chatted to me throughout. So there might be some weird sentences as I accidentally type random words from our conversations. Here is the lovely view from the table. That’s…
Pure Admiration
This post is a companion piece for yesterday’s post about Sarah Raven’s Dahlia trial beds, Pure Envy. Today I will take you around the cutting gardens and Oast House, and we will see how we are all feeling by the end. You enter the gardens through the cutting gardens. My eye was immediately drawn to…
Pure Envy
Sarah Raven is the reason I am so obsessed by flowers. Anyone who has her catalogue plop through their door will know why. On the ‘Grow your own cut flowers’ Facebook page last week, the lovely LP posted a picture of the newest catalogue with the comment “Well this is dangerous”. We all knew exactly…
Beautiful Bokeh
I learnt this term a few months ago, shortly after I purchased my new camera. Bokeh is the Japanese word for ‘blur’. It describes the blurry, blobby, smeary or smudgy background you get against the foreground image which is in focus. I took a few photos of the bright border this afternoon. I wrote a…
Using the Colour Wheel to Plan your Garden
I have a complete fascination with colour. Gardening seems to have intensified that fascination because there are endless variations in colour in nature. Add changing light and shadow, the interaction of one colour against another, or the texture of a particular petal, a little bit of iridescence, and you have infinite variety. We are all…
Into the Jungle
My mum and I went on an expedition to the jungle. We didn’t fly there. We drove there in a little red mini. We went unprepared, without a mosquito net or insect repellent. But we were wearing plenty of sun-cream. We’d set out for Great Dixter. The expedition leader (me) failed to check whether it…
Starfire
I am having a glorious summer with Phlox. I discovered Phlox through reading Christopher Lloyd’s Colour for Adventurous Gardeners, one of the gardening books I return to time and time again. I have written about my other Phlox varieties in Phloxy Lady? and Boring… Now it is the turn of the loudest and proudest, Phlox paniculata ‘Starfire’. This has wonderful…
Burning Bright
I posted on Sunday about my visit to Sissinghurst, where I concentrated on form and texture in the rose garden. The Cottage Garden has a very different feel at the height of summer. Yes, there is form and texture, but mainly it is about the shimmering, simmering colour. I adore Crocosmia, and this orange form sets…
Six on Saturday: Vintage Silk
As you may have noticed, I have a thing for bright and deeply saturated colour. But I have other weaknesses too. Back in autumn I was seduced by a certain supplier of tulip bulbs and gave into temptation. I decided to try some sun-faded tones: vintage silk alongside my usual velvet and satin. I selected…
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, and E. griffithii ‘Fireglow’: ‘Fireglow’ deserves a close-up: And so does Euphorbia palustris: Whilst those…
