A colleague who is a keen gardener and fortunate enough to have a greenhouse as well as green fingers, offered me some excess plants grown from seed. As I haven't anywhere other than an open porch to store such gifts we agreed to wait for the frosts to finish, it felt like an age but finally today is delivery day!
I was told to expect some spare Cosmos, but actually I've been generously bestowed with dianthus, a fern, some dwarf sunflowers, a tomato plant, a pot geranium, and a fiery burgundy-leafed plant which I was told was "Firecracker" but doesn't look like any of the the Google images I've found.
I'm over the moon especially now that, as the bluebells that are covering the garden right now can only last a few more weeks, I'm panicking that the garden will look sparse over Summer. I just have to work out where to put it all for maximum impact. I offered cake in return, and was told that Ginger is a favourite, so here's my payment - a Nigel Slater Double Ginger Cake.
Pathway border completely filled with plants...grape hyacinths everywhere, dirtying fingers with brown pollen when picked for a Mother's Day bouquet...primroses, becoming the bullies of the border...a beautiful yellow flower I remember from gardens in west London but what is it's name?...wonderful vivid flowers from the azalea...alien peonies coming up everywhere now...foxgloves doing a treat.
The promise of blossom on the cherry tree...pretty white bells on the azalea...peonies starting to poke their alien heads out of the ground...a surprise daffodil(narcissus? daffodil?)...pinpoints of intense pink and purple from the lungwort I took a gamble on last year and didn't weed out of the border
We took a trip out to one of my favourite local National Trust gardens on Saturday - Charlcote Park. The gardens aren't particularly extensive or notable, unlike nearby Hidcote, being mostly deer park, but the croquet lawn there has two long herbaceous border strips and I'd been hoping to plunder them for some inspiration for my own, much smaller, front path borders.
Unfortunately the borders were looking pretty sparse apart from some lovely dancing grasses, however on another deeper border near the cafe there was a much more unusual planting scheme...
Back from a weekend in Somerset with A's family and with a gift of four foxglove plants from the family garden. When we moved to the house most of the plants in the path border had already flowered and gone over. In amongst the azalea I found a single spike of something, full of tiny brown black seed, which I collected in a twist of brown paper and optimistically labelled "foxglove".
I'm usually one for muted pastel colours in the garden but in a foxglove I can tolerate the blowsiest of fuschias. I love watching the bumble bees busy in and out of the tubular flowers and was looking forward to bulking up my solitary foxglove with some baby plants that would bloom over the Summer. Casually mentioning my plans over the weekend I was more than a bit disappointed to learn that foxgloves are biennials and I wouldn't be seeing flowers for another year. However, the disappointment didn't last for long because I left with four healthy foxglove plants which had self-seeded into a border the year before; these I planted into the shadiest end of my garden in a small drift with the hope that they will self-seed some more.
