Saturday 18 May 2013

Garden Flowers for the House

Looking out of the windows this morning and seeing so much colour starting to emerge amongst all the fresh green, it just took my fancy to go out and cut some flowers to bring into the house. I picked up the secateurs ready to wander out to see what might do.
Even before I left the back door, I noticed the rose scented pelargonium cuttings I took last autumn were flowering.


All the tulips look ready to drop petals but there were plenty of other options.

 

 

A posy of violas? Certainly appealing.


The starry white flowers of ramsons are very pretty but the smell would probably mean they would be confined to the kitchen. There's a very good reason they are also known as bears' garlic!

 

This chaenomeles is a lovely colour but I think I should leave them to bear fruit. Even if I don't get around to harvesting them to make jelly in the autumn, the birds will appreciate them in winter. The only time I have seen fieldfares in the garden was during one snowy spell when they came in to eat the fruit left on this shrub.


I'm pleased to have bluebells at all this year. The bitten off leaf to the right of the flowers bears witness to the visit of a family of roe deer just when the leaves of the bluebells and day lilies were starting to emerge. Overnight the plants were grazed to within an inch of their lives but thankfully the deer have been absent for several weeks now so things have recovered and are coming along nicely.


Centaurea is one of those plants which seems to have it all. The leaves, the buds and the flowers are all pretty and they just get on with what they do best with very little work on my part.

 

This is another such plant. Its name is one of those things which skips capriciously in and out of mind (currently absent, unfortunately) - such dainty and pristine little daisy like flowers with feathery verdigris foliage.


Good old self-seeding, cottage garden granny's bonnets. If you can imagine pink doves, you can see why these flowers are also named columbines after the word 'columba' meaning dove.
 Eventually I picked none of these but I did end up with flowers in a vase on the dining room mantel piece. No delicate posy but a large container filled as a result of some necessary tasks, although I like to think it wasn't entirely devoid of some aesthetic considerations. It certainly has a delicate perfume.


 There is some of the blossom from Our Own apple. I mentioned in a previous post that it leans over the front fence and I accept that not everyone using the footpath outside wishes to be all that intimately acquainted with its charms so I tend to prune back the intruding branches while it is flowering. It is the earliest apple I know of and it has the most fragrant blossom of any of the apples we have in the garden.



The green umbellifer is alexanders. This is a herb I like to have in the garden however that is not to say I am happy to see it everywhere. The first year it flowered I let it get on with it and, as the seed heads ripened,  I admired the ochre yellow stems and black seeds it produced - until the following spring when I found it coming up all over the place. Just like ramsons really - let them set seed at your peril. It's almost enough for each of them to be classified as weeds, I suppose.  I have learned to make sure that both of them have their immature flowers chopped off and sent to the green waste collection which composts at a far higher heat than our own bins do, so ensuring that next spring these two wonderful plants only come back where they are welcome.


Sunday 5 May 2013

Pottering in the garden

Now it's not as if I haven't got enough flower pots lying about to use for this season's planting plans but a bout of kitchen de-cluttering had left a little stack of kitchen pots and pans to be got rid of and I started seeing another use for them. This is far from the first time I have seen odd items  in terms of garden uses. (Remember this and this?)


Can't you just see them as planters? The old wok and the base of the steamer set (sadly the victim of a boil dry incident which totally wrecked the enamel on the inside) would need drainage holes. HeWhoOwnsTheTools said I should use a special metal drill bit and the electric drill.


Please tell me you will wear safety goggles if you are going to do this. The thought of all those little metal filings being flung about, possibly in the direction of  something as precious and vulnerable as your eyes just doesn't bear thinking about.
With the holes in, I then filled the wok with seed compost, gave it a good drenching with water and let it drain before scattering on the seeds.


A light covering of vermiculite, misted over with a spray bottle to stop it blowing around and I was ready to sit back and wait for my salad leaves to grow.


I find this way of planting a scattering of small seeds works well and stops the seeds from getting washed around.

The top two tiers of the steamer already had a lot of holes.


So many, in fact, that I put in three circles of newspaper to stop the compost being washed out.


I quite like these seed mats, in this case, for basil. A lazy way of ensuring the seeds are well-spaced.


I love basil as a herb. Like parsley and chives, it is something that I never seem to have too much of. However I can never plant up a pot or even buy a pot of basil from the supermarket without being reminded of William Holman Hunt's picture of  Isabella and the Pot of Basil and the rather grisly story behind it in Keats's poem.
The salad leaves are doing well and haven't let the low temperatures over night put them off germinating.


The copper band is that stuff which slugs and snails are supposed not to be able to cross. So far so good - ours are not the only mouths expecting to feed from our garden.
And what has gone into the steamer pot? Why, calendula - otherwise know as pot marigolds, of course.