Should, in future, this blog acquire any readers, and should those readers be interested enough to read the archives, the reason for the long silence was that I had an essay to hand in, and then immediately went on holiday. (We went to Bamburgh. It was very pretty; lots of long walks were taken.)
However, I’m back now.
I’ve just come in from the longest gardening session so far this year. I do love the light evenings in the summer; you can get quite a few garden-hours in before night falls. And it’s not late enough in the year for the midgies to be out in force, either.
Last Sunday, my very kind and lovely mother accompanied me to buy bedding plants. I’ve never done this before and had not much idea what I wanted, or how many I needed. Mum always says she buys too few and has to go back to fill in the gaps. However, my garden is about a quarter of the size of hers, and I just managed to fit all mine in.
I got: a tall pink primula, pinks (only one plant, but “a pink” sounds a bit odd), sweet williams, trailing lobelias, and lots and lots of petunias. Mum had a variety called “Million Bells” last year which I particularly liked – the bells are small, and it flowered pretty much right through into winter. So I got some of those (in bright pink and pale pink) and some bigger petunias, mostly purply-blue, though there are some white, red and magenta ones too. Mum also gave me a yellow daisy thing (the name of which I’ve forgotten) and a lupin, also pink.
(For someone who doesn’t much go for pink as a colour, I seem to have a great many pink flowers in my garden right now. As well as all of the above, I have roses (pink and yellow), a mysterious thing I thought was a passionflower but now seems to be
pink jasmine, and the most wonderful paeonies. None of which I can take any credit for, because they were all here when I arrived, but they’re lovely nonetheless.)
I also got around to enlarging the flowerbed nearest the house. It’s the only one we can really see from downstairs, and abuts the lawn, right next to the fence on the left side. This makes it quite difficult to mow that corner of lawn, and I’ve been feeling for a while that I could do with more space for flowers. So I took a quarter-circle out of the lawn, which solves both problems and makes everything less boringly rectilinear. It also gave me somewhere to put my purple hebe and quite a few of those petunias.
J, for his part, mounted a trellis on the shed for me, as well as making improvements to our burglar-alarm system (which isn’t gardening but is pretty impressive nonetheless. He didn’t even set it off).
So everything looks quite good now. Unfortunately, by the time I’d finished and got the earth off myself, it was dark, so I haven’t got any photos of the great works yet.
I shall take some tomorrow, when the plan is (if it’s still dry) to weed-and-feed the lawn and plant out my veggies, possibly not in that order.
