Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Gertude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens created a kitchen garden with herbs, vegetables and flowers for cutting on The Holy Island of  Lindisfarne. We found these sweet peas overlooking the garden from a string trellis, one summer evening.
For more about Lindisfarne’s garden, visit the National Trust website.
The recent RHS Hampton Court Flower Show offered the chance to see some new varieties up close. Today I’m sharing a few pictures taken at the show of a new introduction from David Austin, Rosa ‘Mill on the Floss’. Continue reading “Mill on The Floss – a new pink English rose for 2018”
Chris Myers and I were chuffed to bits by the turn of events at The RHS Chatsworth Flower Show last week. We both had good reason. After a slow start (the judges’ Silver Medal theoretically rated it worst in show), the garden he’d designed was validated by the popular vote, being named the one the public loved most. Me? I’d been rooting for it!
Naturalistic plantings were a theme of this year’s show, but his garden was a hymn in praise of wildflowers (or more of a folksong). I enjoyed lingering awhile, listening to the sighs of pleasure as people glimpsed Hay Time In The Dales for the first time and felt its emotional pull. I knew this garden would haunt me, and it already is.
I thought of it when our evening walk took us past a flower-rich hay meadow between Edgworth and the Wayoh Reservoir. Around its peak now, the wildflowers include buttercups, yellow rattle, meadow vetchling, red clover, wild blue lupins, and a blend of grasses. A public information sign beside the meadow explains this patch of land represents what is now one of the rarest habitats in the UK.
It all seems so normal, and that’s part of the problem. Â Â Continue reading “Hay Time In The Dales: People’s Choice Award Winner At RHS Chatsworth”
Snowdrops are so hyped up this year that the clickbait on the BBC News website’s most viewed article on Saturday morning was Are you suffering from galanthomania?. Anything that sounds like an ailment evidently has the whole of Britain (minus those aware that a galanthus is a snowdrop) clicking away to find out if they have the symptoms. Well, it is winter.
I have recorded my personal pangs here, but wouldn’t go so far as to call it a mania. Muddy knees, sometimes; mania, nope.
But I won’t try to deny that snowdrops cast spells on us. Continue reading “Snowdrop-aholics in the news”
When Suzie Cranston’s world was rocked by the death of her son, Peck, a sign saying ‘Peace begins in the garden’ inspired her to create a garden that would celebrate his life.
Beautiful at any time of the year, my sweetheart and I often pause to admire it on walks through our quirky little neighbourhood, Fondren, in Jackson, Mississippi. More than twenty years after starting the garden, Suzie is eager for others to enjoy it as much as she does. She welcomes visitors with a broad smile, pointing out things they may have missed: flowers, garden art, a new birdhouse and, in particular, things that Peck would have loved, such as the tortoises which appear everywhere. Continue reading “Suzie Cranston’s Birdhouse Garden”
It’s a terrible pun, but The Wellbeing Of Women garden was the one to wow me at this year’s RHS Hampton Court Flower Show. I wasn’t alone: it won the prestigious People’s Choice in the Small Garden category. Continue reading “Hampton Court Flower Show’s WOW garden”
Susan Rushton 