The bright border is at its midsummer zenith!
Tag: crocosmia
Diversity
Nature has many different solutions to the problem of how to get a flower pollinated. This post explores the diversity of flower forms, with cups, plates, trap-doors, bells, umbels and more!
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…
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 like the way that the smudgy bokeh radiates outwards from the ink-splash shape…
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…
Butterflies and Buddleia in the Bright Border
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,…
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…
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,…
The Mindful Gardener 