Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
I almost missed out on the week of flowers, hosted by Cathy of Words and Herbs, but am scraping in with this froth of wildflowers for day 7.  The pink, raindrop-covered flower is corncockle, which is now vanishingly rare in the wild in Britain but still appears in annual wildflower mixes. Continue reading “Corncockle in a Wildflower Border”
The longer we linger in gardens and green spaces, the more we value a place to sit. Over the last 18 months one of our most useful garden accessories, the bench, has been widely used and appreciated as never before.
I’m celebrating wooden benches that range in character from beautifully finished to rough-hewn and from classic to contemporary, by way of quirky and downright artsy. If your imagination works this way, try removing the bench from one pictures and replacing it with another. Garden furniture is more than just practical: the style of each bench alters the way we see its surroundings. Continue reading “Wooden Garden Benches: Smooth and Rough-Hewn, Traditional and Modern”
Companion plants will bring out the best characteristics of roses – especially shrub roses – and help to make up for any weaknesses. While they’ll mingle around, above or below the roses, they should not compete too aggressively for food, water or space. Continue reading “Great Companion Plants for a Cottage Garden: Roses”
Bluebells woods have a mysterious air. To get the full effect, you have to imagine everything moving in the lightest breeze, bees humming in the bells, birds singing as they attend their nests, and the odd grey squirrel bouncing around.
Light dapples through the tender young beech and chestnut leaves, moving across one patch then another; brightening or fading as clouds float between the woodland and the sun. Continue reading “A Peek into an English Bluebell Wood”
Over the last few months I’ve been paying attention to lichens. The trouble is, the more closely you look, the more questions arise.
After a while the boundary between stone and lichen seems to blur. Are some of these decorative patterns the stone itself, or are they all lichens? Continue reading “Lichens on Stone Walls in Darwen, Lancashire”
There’s something about roses with many petals. For many, these romantic, soulful plants are the archetypal roses, especially if they happen to be pink and to have a good fragrance.
Some of these do and some don’t. What interests me about them is their flower forms, the patterns the petals take, and the way the blooms cluster together. The odd one you may recognise. Continue reading “Old-fashioned Pink Roses With Lots of Petals”
A free-to-visit garden is not to be sniffed at – but then again, some of them are. Few visitors to a rose garden can resist leaning in to inhale the fragrance. We seem hard-wired to think ‘scent’ the moment after we think ‘rose’.
Shakespeare’s ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ can’t take all the credit. Scent associations trap memories like flies in amber in a lifetime’s layering of impressions. Continue reading “Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, Texas, and Memories of Roses”
Susan Rushton 