Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
If you’ve got a pile of spare plant pots, why not follow RHS Garden Rosemoor’s example and turn them into flowerpot men? I’m not convinced they’re lifelike enough to scare the birds away from the crops in their kitchen garden, but they made me smile.
I always look forward to seeing the finalists in the annual Young Designer competition at the RHS Tatton Park Flower Show. This is a detail of Charlie Hartigan’s 1 in 10 garden, voted the People’s Choice for the Best Large Garden. I loved the colour combination and the abundance of traditional cottage garden plants in a contemporary space. Continue reading “1 in 10 Garden by Charlie Hartigan”
Regular readers will know of my fascination with blue poppies (meconopsis). My timing has been out and I’ve only seen the odd one or two this year so here’s a picture from Harlow Carr last year.
Sightings of delphiniums are always very welcome too, be they stocky little spires or towering ones. The lovely folk word ‘bee’ describes the petals at centre of each floret. The stocky delphiniums above have white bees and the ones below, lavender-blue ones.
This year hasn’t been a flower dearth – far from it. Rosemoor provided me with as many flowers as I could hope for, even setting aside the roses I shared a fortnight ago. and even though my capacity to hope for flowers is huge. Continue reading “Blue Flowers”
This is an outtake from yesterday’s Chalky Pastel Flowers post. Not because it forgot its words or slipped on something, I hasten to add – I decided that it didn’t help my contention. It was too maroon.
Although the band and thin stripes decorating these scalloped bells would have qualified as chalky, and the flowers do pale to a lovely antique pink as they age, there’s more to this story. The ribbed buds, the debonaire green flower ‘caps’, the purple stems and tinges on the foliage, the long bell shape with its parabolic edge… if somebody told me one of these flowers had won a Nobel Prize for something and asked me to guess which one, I’d have no hesitation in pointing to the campanula. Continue reading “Campanula takesimana ‘Elizabeth’”
It’s just my personal taste, but while white flowers such as this double hollyhock entrance me, I’m rarely convinced by white borders. I take in the overall effect, think “Ooh! A classic white border. Perhaps it will be better at its peak?”, then move on.
This year’s Tatton Park Flower Show gave me an insight into what twist a white border might have that would truly inspire me: chalky pastels. Continue reading “White and Chalky Pastel Flower Palette from the RHS Tatton Park Flower Show”
From the Baylor Street Art Wall in Austin, Texas, shared for Becky’s Month of Blue Squares.
At York Gate Garden you seem to be witnessing living garden history, without any sense of the faded past glories you sometimes feel, even in the best gardens. Continue reading “York Gate in Leeds: An Arts and Crafts Style Garden”
Susan Rushton 