I have been talking recently about sensory aspects of gardening, with colour and form. Today it is the turn of texture. Specifically, flower texture. When I was a child, I liked fluff. I remember staying in a hotel one night and having an incredibly fluffy blanket. I kept pulling off bits of wool all night and in…
Category: Texture
Supersonic
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…
Infatuation
It is easy to think that the garden has done what it is going to do this summer. We can only deadhead spent blooms and keep things watered, and continue to keep things going into autumn. And then it does this! Which very quickly become this: And then they do this! And you just can’t…
Sissinghurst in fine form
I think it has been four or five weeks since I visited Sissinghurst. This is unprecedented. It has just been too hot to do anything other than languish in the shade of my own garden. But the temperature temporarily dipped, so I could move again. The castle is being engulfed by planting. That’s the built…
Prehistoric
Many of my favourite plants come from South Africa. They are incredibly useful in my bright border, where they like the full sun, tolerate drought, and, most importantly, provide late summer colour. Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ is probably the most dramatic. It may not flower for as long as Helenium, or Rudbeckia, or Echinacea, but its sculptural form…
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,…
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…
Aging Beauties
I am infinitely more at ease with the way I look in my forties compared with my teens, twenties or thirties. I have heard women complain that they feel invisible as they age, but maybe I felt too visible when I was younger. Or visible for the wrong reasons. I was judged on what I…
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…
Cauliflorescence!
I am indebted to the lovely Jane from Jane’s Mudgee Garden for the title of this post. ‘Cauliflorescence’ describes the phenomenon of a flower producing blossoms directly from the tree’s trunk, which is what the Judas Tree is known for. Do you want to see it? Here it is closer up. The flowers are pea-like, but if…
Good morning, my fine feathered friends!
The title is an homage to one of my favourite children’s books, Quentin Blake’s Cockatoos. Each morning Professor Dupont, a dapper chap, jumps out of bed, takes a shower, cleans his teeth, gets dressed, ties his tie, adjusts his spectacles and goes downstairs. He goes into his conservatory and there are all his cockatoos. He throws wide…
