You can tell I am a Brit because this is another post with weather-related tendencies!! but how deliciously lovely to have long summer days filled with blue skies, sunshine and real warmth - nay hotness even! Some people were despairing we would ever enjoy the like again....
My most anticipated and molly-coddled plants are always sweetpeas....I cannot get enough of them. They typify English gardens, lemonade and strawberry jam-type days.. and I always try and grow them from seed myself. I count the day I buy new seed packets for the following summer as a great day on my calendar...then take care in tending them in the greenhouse, planting them in long tube containers to ensure good strong roots. I am very particular about the choice of flowers, no gaudy new fandangled types for me....beautiful blues and delicate pinks with strong perfume. They are planted out when the frosts are past, and covered up if there should be the threat of one; staked early to train strong stems and fed regularly with plant food in the water. Yes, I admit it's all a bit of a palaver, but so worth it when I pick the flowers for my house, and the scent is truly out-of-this-world.....my treat to me really.......I have some on my kitchen window-sill, the first ones picked this year, and they are worth every little bit of time spent in nurturing them.
I love my garden. When we first arrived at Michaelmas Cottage, it was a long piece of lawn with a car track up to it....nothing else....and it has been a labour of love to plan, dig, plant, chop and change ideas to see if they worked....it's always going to be a work in progress but so are the best gardens, and people really - we are never the final, finished product....Here are some little windows into my gardening world...
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| An old wooden bread bin found in a vintage shop now stores bought and collected seeds. The small seed packet being hollyhock seeds from a house in France we stayed in two years ago, and the plants from which are growing tall and strong in the back garden. |
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| Sweetpeas and Sweet William flowers smell glorious... |
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| Cordelia, our sweetpea fairy....named by my youngest child |
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| Our labour of love; work in progress.... |
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| Sundowner......wouldn't swop the view for anything... |
Reading this made me remember that when Eliana was born there were wild sweetpeas growing in the hedgerows all around where we were living, and that Amy C brought me some in the labour room that day. Thank you for bringing back a special memory! Your sweetpeas are definitely worth the effort - well done you.
ReplyDeleteAs Eliana and Olivia are only days apart I remember that time also....the pic of Cordelia the fairy, is also of wild perennial sweetpeas, I don't have to do a thing with them they just sprout each year! my others are the time-consuming ones...xx
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