We have moved out to France at a fabulous time of year as the flowers are blooming left right and centre. In fact, so quickly that if you blink you might miss them. They have been a real inspiration for the design of my most recent sample board that I featured at the end of my last blog post.
I was out in the garden yesterday taking some photographs, however flowers, plus wind, plus taking photos don’t really go hand in hand so I did my best!
There are beautiful roses at the top of the garden…
Muddled in with these pink rock roses below…
And these rather crazy-looking, aptly named “Crimson bottlebrushes”….
I can’t wait to see what happens to these exotic looking torch lilies in the foreground (also known as red hot pokers!), and I need to find out what the ones in the background are…
At the other end of the garden we have this pretty Red Buckwheat that the bumble bees seem to love…
Some lovely irises in a variety of colours including the purple here, plus red and yellow…
We are also eagerly awaiting the arrival of the deep red coloured cherries, at present they are very green but our patience should be worth it in the long run…
The final news on the flowers front is that the elderflower tree is ready to harvest so we can make our own cordial (or liqueur!). I have never tried to make it before, but having looked up a recipe it sounds pretty straight forward, basically a load of sugar and a trip to the pharmacy for some citric acid!
The vegetable garden is also coming on, I spent time earlier this week planting beans, I was especially taken by the mysterious large coloured seeds – who knows what they will grow into…
The chore of the week has been all the weeding. There is a plant called Scouring Rush/Horsetail (known as Prêle in French) everywhere and it seems to grow at a rate of knots (I noticed a flower bed I had spent time on last week already had tendrils at least 15cm tall today even though I thought I had pulled them all out-argh!!). It is really nasty and is pretty much impossible to kill or get the roots up as they are so long. This wheelbarrow-full was from just one of the beds.
We are also being visited by hundreds of different insects, most of which are just too quick or camera shy for me to capture. I spotted a bee with a rather fetching ginger wig on darting in and out of all of the flowers the other day!
There has also been a very sociable butterfly circling round the same spot for a fews days now (George informs that it’s of the Zebra Swallowtail variety), which just loved posing for photographs.
This is rather apt as I have spent a number of hours this week working on a book of British Butterflies that was given to me last year, I wrote a bit about it in my previous blog post about stub bindings. It was published in 1835 and when I pulled the original cover from the book I found an advert that had been recycled in order to construct the spine – fantastic!
More about how I am getting on with this binding in a future blog update. In the meantime, it’s that time again, the grass has reached a critical length and needs to be dealt with so off to do some mowing…
