foxgloves

I’ve been busy in the house and garden during the past few days, doing deeply boring things like plastering a wall and fixing a new clothes dryer whirly thingy in the grass. I can’t make my mind up whether the pole is squint or the ground is, but it’s concreted in now so fingers crossed that it doesn’t keel over if it is squee gee!

If you’ve been watching the Scottish Open Golf Championship you’ll realise that the heavens have opened with a vengeance. After almost a week of lovely weather the rain has been of Biblical proportions, thunder and all. Some places have been flooded but luckily not here.

These are a few of the garden photos which I took whilst the sun was shining. I bought the lily corms a few years ago, from a pound shop would you believe – 8 corms for £1 to be precise and they are multiplying. I’m really not too sure about them. I do like them but I sort of think that they’re a bit fancy for my garden, most of the planting is cottagey with quite simple flowers and herbs. On the other hand I suppose cottage gardens have always had formal bits in them like topiary so they kind of fit in. The colours are nice anyway.

The astrantias above are lovely to look at but I once made the mistake of cutting some for putting in a vase in the house – it wasn’t long before I realised that they stink like a dirty old cloth!

I love the random blue splashes on this cranesbill geranium. I thought that it had disappeared from my garden completely because the area which I planted it in is becoming congested with that very pretty yellow plant thug. Luckily I discovered this one on the other side of the garden, these geraniums are very obliging at seeding themselves.

So that’s what the garden was looking like a few days ago but everything was being fairly well flattened by the torrential rain today. I know the plants needed water – but not that much!

I allow these alpine strawberries to grow in amongst the other plants in my garden, rather than having them in rows together. It’s more natural looking that way and the birds seem to leave them alone. Sometimes I stumble across a strawberry plant which I didn’t even know was there whilst I’m weeding. They’ve sort of gone a bit wild, they may be really wee but to me they taste really delicious, especially compared with the big fat strawberries which you get in most supermarkets. They look sumptuous but they’re often such a disappointment as they’re pretty tasteless.

As you can see, I try to squeeze as much into my garden as possible, I’m also not very good at cutting things back. I get into a terrible mess sometimes, well the plants do because I say to myself – I’ll prune it after it flowers, and then when it flowers I’m saying I’ll just let the birds have the berries.

There are several shrubs shoehorned in, the bright yellow climbing one is a golden hop. The original plant doesn’t seem to have survived the winter but several bits of it have ‘hopped’ elsewhere, and they are doing fine.

The perenial sweet peas have been in the garden since we moved here over 23 years ago and they are a bit of a menace because they pop up all over the place like goose-grass and unfortunately this is the only colour that they come up in. The yellow flowering plant was a teeny wee bit of root which was given to me and I don’t know what it is but it’s very vigorous too and I’ve been trying to get rid of most of it because I think it’s strangling some plants.

I got my love of gardening from my dad and I think he probably wouldn’t have given my foxgloves space in his garden. He would almost certainly have regarded them as weeds but I love them and more importantly the bees adore them, so I just leave them to seed themselves, which they’re very happy to do.

Well that’s the latest meander around my garden over. I hope you enjoyed the wee stroll!

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