AWD continued

Again, I apologise to my regular readers ;-) for limited output....
It's been a busy weekend. More decorating. Visits from old friends, a trip to John Lewis' café with my little boy for afternoon tea! Gardening, you will see, is prominent only through its absence from this list.

Yes, it's still raining torrentially, and so, I've kind of left things to it, although it does need tidying.

It's amazing what a few day's rain does to growing things...I could swear that everything is at least an inch taller than it was last week. Things are more fulsome, more dense as well. Glad as I am that everything is growing so well in the rain, I would love to get out there and do a bit of work. I'm a bit of a wimp you see, and don't fancy getting soaked, so rain does stop play for me.

I should also mention that the living room is now a vast improvement from the four walled migraine it was last week. A soft blue on the walls (that I am still not quite sure my husband likes), top quality John Lewis curtains no less, and the removal, thank the gods, of the hideous olde worlde fake brass chandelier type thing. Replaced by a very tasteful JL light fitting which if I describe it will sound like it's knocking shop fare, but in reality is anything but. Take a look...

You will see that I am somewhat partial to John Lewis for my interior fittings (amongst other things) - this is what happens when you live within five minutes of one - oh I need a lightbulb, oh better pay £5 for a special John Lewis one, oh and we need a toothbrush holder - oh that'll be £20 then please....it's so convenient, and so NICE you end up buying everything there.

Or at least one did until today, when a cursory visit to internet banking gave me a bit of a jolt!

Anyway, enough meandering for now - I need to go and hunt down a rhododendron. I have rhododendron envy. Our nextdoor neighbour has the most amazing variety in their back garden....

AWOL or rather AWD

Apologies for the absence of posts over the last few days - this has been due in part to the endless rain (rain the garden needs, but nevertheless makes outdoor living impossible!)....but also due to my other 'home improvement' project - decorating.

So, I have been Absent While Decorating.

When we moved to our house, we inherited amongst other things, some slightly spurious decorating. If I say off blue fleur de lys wallpaper with a second rate william morris style border, crossed with off blue on turquoise sponging, you'll be able to envisage our living room.

Now since our living room overlooks the garden, and once the garden is in full swing, I want to smugly sit and admire it, the quarters from which I admire need to be pleasant.

To be honest, that's probably too polite a way of putting it, and I am trying too hard to segue neatly into a garden related motivation.

Basically the room is a HORROR. It's a feng shui nightmare, a Laurence Llewellyn Bowen gone wrong, an interior design crime. It had to be changed as husband and I decided we could suffer its visual assault no longer.

So all week I've been painting over said fleur de lys (yes, we needed a quick fix - we didn't have time to strip all the offending paper off) with a calming blue colour. It's the first time I've decorated a room, and my goodness, it's exhausting, and requires meticulous attention to detail, patience, and perseverance that to be honest not even my darling garden extracts from me.

My son has just woken so I will post the second half of this story later...

cheating

I know it's not the done thing to pass off an embellishment of the previous day's post as a new post, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Here are some piccies of the plants I told you about yesterday:

The African Marigold

The small green shoots next to the bigger leaves are new bits of the Hart's Tongue fern I was worried wasn't growing!

The exquisite first bud of my Maigold climbing rose - can't wait to see it in full bloom

I could spend the rest of this post telling you about my latest garden endeavor, but then this ended in a hissy fit - so probably best to try again, and tell a more successful tale later. Suffice to say I am not brilliant with a hammer and garden wire, but somehow want to train my Jasmine and one of my Clematis to grow up a fence.

Ooooh - off to try out my new buggy now - going to pick my little prince up from childcare!

The rains, and my scent concept

As had been promised, the rain finally arrived today.
My Husband swears things have grown almost before our eyes thanks to the steady pouring of water this morning. Of course, I am chuffed the plants have had a good load of water chucked at them, but the rain these days also appeals to my inherent laziness - Oh good, I thought, I wont have to cart 6 watering cans full back and forth from the kitchen to the garden. We have no outdoor tap you see.

So how is the garden looking?

The African marigolds look spectacular; standing tall like bright yellow lolly pops around the front and back gardens, and finally it seems as if my hart's tongue fern is getting to grips with life in our garden, and has decided to make something of itself.
So, more importantly, how is the garden smelling?

For the first time yesterday the wind carried the fragrance of my wallflower and jasmine to where I was sitting playing with my son. That pleased me.


I have always wanted the garden to be a multisensory experience - and had chosen, and placed plants and flowers with that in mind. The garden is a visual feature, of course, but I really enjoy the possibility of scent being carried to the sitting area on our patio, and even beyond.

In fact my 'scent concept' is this: re-create the scent of the garden of my childhood. So far, I recall lupins, wallflowers, roses, hyacinths, snap dragons, sweet peas....some of which we now have in the garden. And of course there are new additions - stuff which wasn't in vogue in the early 80's - Jasmine, and that kind of thing!

The pièce de la resistance scent wise for me, will be a frangipani - when I can find one.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not one of these orientalists that plans to fill the garden with banana trees, and a ton of palms - let's face it, we're in the home counties! But if I were to choose one 'tropical' flower to have at home, it would have to be the heady, complex frangipani. We're still trying to find a reputable place to get one from the UK - and even then, there is no guarantee we'll be able to bring it to flower....and then of course there are SO MANY to choose from do I want a Singapore White or a Tricolore? Each brings with it its own scent nuance as well...

So, the kinds of questions I'd ask, if I had any regular, returning visitors - which so far, I don't think I do.....(weeps silently)

- any good suggestions for frangipani to grow in the UK, and trusted suppliers?
- How difficult is it to get an outside tap in a back garden if the kitchen and bathroom are all at the front?

any answers, anyone? (oh no, I feel like a kid who knows father christmas doesn't exist, still writing a letter to him asking for presents...hopefully, in time this wont be the case!)

Illness stops play

I've been feeling rotten for the past few days (another head cold, imported from my son's childcare I shouldn't wonder)...so gardening has been put on the back burner.

However, with the slightly cooler weather, things seemed to have managed ok with two days of neglect!

My climbing rose looks as if it's on the cusp of blooming - there's plenty of tiny buds on it, and the fragrant mix seeds I sowed a few weeks back have started to burst through the soil.

Other than that, nothing much to report, other than how struck I was at the beauty of the horse chestnut flower.

Living in a city which relishes trees (unlike our former city who seem to be cutting them down) we are lucky to have entire avenues lined with these noble arbors.

Usually I only see their candy floss like flowers from a distance, but my stepson found one on the ground and gave it to me as a gift. Seeing it from close up I noticed how dainty, and attractive they were, with the subtle difference in colour between each flower, and their almost 'tropical' shape and markings.

In fact I found the 'tropicalness' of the flowers quite interesting given the H.C is a typical find in Britain. Although I've now discovered that the tree originates from southern Europe, so that would explain that!

I kept one to photograph in order to post it here, but of course motherhood and step motherhood meant I had other more pressing chores to perform. Then I forgot, and it has now wilted. So you'll have to suffice with a borrowed photo.

And now the garden has been lovingly watered, husband has 'hoovered' the lawn as our nextdoor neighbour's son calls it, and it all looks fecund, green and cared for once more!

gardening in the age of instant gratification

Is it just me, or does anyone else find that just sometimes, just for a tiny moment, you wish that things would grow, flower, show their full potential a bit quicker?

......waits for flaming from the orthodoxy of gardening.........

Ok, well what I mean, or what I am pondering this morning, as I sip my huge vat of coffee, is how, in an age of instant gratification, do we cope with those past times, those activities, those phenomena of life which errrr, take a bit longer, or make you wait, and yet, there is nothing much that modern technology can do to speed up the process.

More than ever, if we want something, we get it - and we demand that we wait as little as possible for it.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a polemic about a human condition I see as repugnant and alien to my own. When pregnant with my darling boy there were moments when I daydreamed the possibility of fast forwarding things a bit (in a way which did no damage to either of us of course, and on another post I'll explain why my desire was acute at times). And I, like other mums, am delighted when the little one shows signs of mastering a skill ahead of his age. Also, I'd love it if someone told me I could lose all my pregnancy weight in two weeks, and as for that pushchair I've ordered, well it would have been great to get it today...... But then I am getting sidetracked. Or am I.

In fact, I see many parallels between a growing child and a growing garden. A child wont do anything before it's ready - you can't force them to eat solid food when they're not ready for it, nor can you train them to walk before time. And the same with the plants in my garden. As exciting as it would be to see them all in their full glory, this cannot be achieved by any means known to me so far. Some will flower by the end of the summer. Some wont do anything till next year.

But then, I wonder, if the marching of technology continues, will this be the case forever? Will we, some time in the future, be able to expediate the growing of children, the time spent in utero, the germination, blooming of plants and flowers.

Wow, a heavyweight piece of pondering for the morning. What got me thinking about this? Reading Gardener's World magazine last night, nearly every single plant or flower I saw that I liked were the kinds of things I would need to sow this year, and see nothing much of until next year. I found myself ignoring their possibility simply because I would have to wait to see them at their best. And this is where the parallel between garden and child is lost. One does not sit waiting for a child to come into 'bloom' or become an adult, ignoring all that they do in between time, or seeing it as the means to an end.

Rather we relish every day of their existence, seeing newness and beauty in all that they do, and in a way, cherishing their innocence, newness, their fragility. Perhaps it's time I applied the same motif to my plants, and rather than waiting for the glorious flower of the agapanthus, delight in the green of its leaves, the progress of its growth.

Feeding babies and gardens

I had to work late last night, and in my absence my husband had to put our son to bed, and prepare numerous bottles. I still breastfeed my son when I'm around, so it's always a bit of an upheaval for both dad and son when I'm not there.
Whilst we're on the subject of feeding, although our son did of course get his feeds, albeit the second rate ersatz to mummy's milk, the garden didn't get its daily watering, nor were our new raspberry shrubs planted.

This evening I was home on time, and once the little man was in bed (am now talking about my son, not my husband!!) my first thoughts were of the garden.

I love getting out in the warm evening sun, once the boy is safe in bed. I feel the day washing out from every pore, and take in the smells of the jasmine, and the musky, smoky almost yeasty smell of our tree bark mulch - not an unpleasant combination actually!

I planted the raspberry plants in a rather rudimentary fashion - pretty much dug a hole and stuck them in, so who knows what'll happen with them. I watered everything else.
Nothing new to report really - everything is ticking over at the moment, although I do worry about the heat drying everything out. Am really enjoying the scent of our perennial wallflower - apricot twist!

Current gardening concerns I mull over during my commute:
1)How to make watering easier, but not become really environmentally irresponsable?
2)Is it ok, etiquette wise , to borrow the neighbour's hose (they've said we can but we're so english about it all we daren't actually use it in case of 'bothering' them!)

Anyway, that's all for now!