Let's get the tulips done with first - orange and purple in a turquoise pot with yellow pansies - the shrub behind is a Skimmia and bursting with flower and scent. I think this is one of the pots not shown so far. The garden is exploding with flowers and everything - just mown the lawn again and it is beginning to perk up a bit. Still areas of scalping, some dead thatch and moles. I know I should scrape away the mole hills but it is easier to run over them in the mower. Our lawn is not a bowling green zone - more a sheared field.
Colour everywhere and today I found the first mecanopsis - the orange version of the wild welsh poppy - Mecanopsis cambrica. We do have the yellow ones too and I have been encouraging them by scattering the seed in the woodland edge. I love poppies in the garden and ought to sow some more - and escholzias, the Californian poppy. I have it on good advice that if you pick poppies and seal the stems in boiling water for twenty seconds they will last our or five days. We will see. We have been trying out other ways to use flowers - these are hellebores in water in a glass cake stand. We tried dandelions in a similar way but they just closed up.
Why do some of the most beautiful flowers - like dandelions and wild bluebells - prove useless once plonked in a vase?
Down in the boggy area the amelanchier is flowering but almost over - everything at least two weeks early this year (except the skiving swallows).
Yesterday I nipped (well, staggered slowly) up to our bedroom and the window that looks up the garden. I had taken my camera to get a panoramic view of the garden. Of course the sun went in immediately but here is a Photomerge of three images.
So April is over and it is 'Oh! To be in England now that May is here,' (or Scotland).
When I was but a lad we did not just have April fool nor a pinch and a punch for the first of the month nor rabbits, rabbits for good luck - we also had May Gosling. This is the same as April fool - 'May goslings, past and gone, you're the fool for making me one.' And on another matter from a previous blog came the question, "What in the **** is a Westmorland window?" So here is picture of ours. It perhaps started with the infamous window tax that operated in England from 1696 to 1851. So one window lit the hall, stairs and landing rather than three and incurred a third of the tax. If you look closely you can see the panes with cling film on to deter the barmy blackbirds. Put it on wet and it breaks up the reflected image - I rant, I have told you all this before - shut up yer nit. We do have a light bulb above the stairs here but it was one of those low energy bulbs and decided to cease functioning just after we moved in. It is very high up and we have not got around to changing it yet - seven years on!
I shall now go and sit down (no, I know - I am not standing up to type this) and read Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
There, I have ended a blog without mentioning a cup of tea - D***!
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