IT IS JUNE AND FLOWERS EVERYWHERE

Get well Gillie, take a dose of a beautiful garden.

The gardener has been digging the drain for the new spring top take the water to the ditch stream and away from the grass. 

The source of the water on the left and the trench on the right. The turf will be put back next week if all is working ok. As we are in a drought it is surprising the spring is still running (unless it is the overflow from the septic tank soakaway?)

It is Wednesday morning and the weather turned last night. We have had a little rain and when I stepped out of the kitchen doors to check the temperature it was 11C. Turning, I looked up at the latest attempt at a house martins nest and, though unfinished, there were two small bird faces peering down at me.
It has not rained a lot - there are dry areas under the trees, but any is welcome.

Now is not a time to park cars under trees as the greenfly are hard at work and their sticky excretions make the leaves shine and the car windows covered in sweet glue.



Walking the lanes the wild honeysuckle is rampant and R picked some wild parsnip and brought it home. In the heat it almost collapsed but we left it till the next morning by when it had perked up. Only trouble will be hundreds of small white petals everywhere later on.



The potatoes are thriving - at least something is growing in the veg beds, but the chard from last year has finally gone to seed. I do have some more seedlings coming on, pests allowing. I went to the local garden centre for some veg seedings but they had sold out so I bought R a Convolvulus cneorum (a shrubby bindweed) which she has always wanted but seems to die in my hands too easily - here we try again.

  
It is good when guests bring plants one does not have - in this case Lamb's Tail, Chiastophyllum oppositifolium, though they will probably change the latin name soon as they keep doing. Thank you P.

The long grass in the lower "lawns" is full of meadow buttercups and there is a large patch of ragged robin. 


I walk on down to the pond where I am watched by the ducks though they do not move away.

ROSES

Finally we have roses -

The yellow one is The Poet's Wife given to us by the children for our golden wedding last year.

We have Albertines in the house filling the room with scent and the white Rambling Rector is just starting to get going.

Red flowers

The quince still flowering after six months.

Yellow flowers

Orange flowers (Rockrose) with bees

and wild flowers - some of the red campion massed in the woodland.

And then here is a plant you thought I would only mention with a cry of anguish as there is more of it in the lawn than grass. But if you look closely at the flower of the ribwort plantain (I know, a weed) it is beautiful. 
". . . and the ribwort plantain in the space
of an eight day early summer
has made new constellations
of its irregular twin star anthers,
its white crown of thorns."
                            Antony Christie

BACK TO DROUGHT

Sunday - 
Saturday's gale blew many of the shingles off the Wendy House roof so will need to get it repaired - with felt I think.
We have great tits in a nesting box, moles in the lawn (actually the moleman has caught four and we wait and see if there are any more), hair that needs cutting, paths that need chippings, a spring that needs a drain, paths need hoeing . . . and I sleep, eat and dream - ennui!

Paths.
From the house -

To the pond

 and up to the wood where the red campion, and the odd white is in full flower, where the butterflies are flittering in the sun.


 

This is the view from my seat at the far end, back to the moss clad dry stone wall, over the moley lawn, past the white birches and across the veg beds to the house

And flowers come and go (so do my seedlings - mice, pigeons, rabbits, slugs - if I grew them think how successful I could be.)

White camassias I love, here with an oriental poppy. The camellia in the wood is still flowering and the may blossom (hawthorn) is like heavy snowfall on the trees.

The azalea (luteum) is throwing drift of scent into the edges of the woodland and glowing in the sunlight. and the knapweed thriving in the shade under the big sycamore.

Elsewhere flowers are filling the beds - the closer together they are the less chance weeds have to grow - or, at least, the less chance I have of spotting them. Anyway, what gardening have I been doing?

Just sown more carrots, again, earthed up potatoes, put out cosmos and courgette plants, the latter with bottomless flower pots with a copper strip around to deter snails and slugs.

And now back to drought - local farmers worried, little rain for more than 2 months, winter barley failed with February rain so sowed wheat - not germinated with drought.

R is busy dead heading the poppies to keep them flowering and I have noticed the other poppies sown last year, especially the Californian ones, are now flowering having survived the winter.





The rhubarb experiment is coming on Okay with new growth so I might pull the rest of the old stems soon.

The house is now full of flowers - the first roses and especially heaps of the beauty bush - kolkwitzia amabilis.
It has grown enormously since last year and we have branches in vases all over the place.

And here is the remains of a mole hill in the long grass with one weed growing from it - 

Even weeds can be attractive.
Back to mundane matters the chipping for the paths and slotted piping for the drain have arrived. It is going to be busy early next week with the gardener, the roof repairer and the boiler man all coming.

Finally the house martins are building under the eaves on three sides of the house -  a joy to watch - I know, they make a mess - so put newspaper under the nest and put that on the compost heap.

GOINGS AND COMINGS

First of all, on request, R's recipe for flapjack/nutty flip.

Recipe for flapjack/nutty flip

(one ounce is about 30G)

Butter 6oz

Golden syrup 6oz, more if you like it sweeter,

Muscovado sugar 4oz

14oz porridge oats

Optional zest half lemon

Pinch ground ginger

Preheat oven 150C

Melt sugar, syrup, butter, add oats, lemon, ginger, mix, put in 8" square tin lined with grease proof paper, bake 40 min. Cool 15 min before cutting.

Right - 

Gardener S came and removed the water lily, well most of it from the pond, then dug a ditch for the new spring and had a go at the brambles. Next day I trudged 5 barrows full of the lily up the garden to be disposed of. Since two requests for a chunk, both collected.
 

The fence is done and I have patched over a few gaps low down as the lambs had got into the garden - no damage done.

The house martins are messing about as usual, shall we build here, no there, no somewhere else. There are now swallows about but not at the house.

Sunday - the mole man is booked for tomorrow afternoon. Normally I am anti catching anything (especially Corvid) but the molehills are becoming mountains. In the end he caught three but says they do not make waistcoats from the skins any more.

Yesterday we walked to Ford Park to buy some herbs and stuff but all we came home with were 5 1/2 parsnip seedlings and an iris. R hopes it is their spectacular white one but it might be purple.
Today we went to a garden centre outside Dalton but bought nothing. We are not really pro bedding plants (apart from the odd cosmos and ammi.)

One feature of our garden are the wildflowers - 

red (and white) campion and ragged robin,

 Sweet woodruff, forget-me-nots and buttercups,

Watercress and even the dandelion.

This, of course is but a few and most are ok but some have to be controlled - wild garlic, bramble, ivy, bindweed, the creeping buttercup, and even the campion has decided to appear in the flower beds now.

I have just sown some more cauliflower as nil came up, we do have broccoli seedlings and broad beans. Half the lettuce seedlings G and L gave us are out, the rest in the shed as back up when the pests devour them.

Let us have some colour - euphorbia, an ornamental strawberry and good old, in-your-face, oriental poppy. 

It is funny how I forget what I put where. In one of the beds I thought I did not plant red hot pokers there and then realised I had planted eremurus, fox-tail lily. The danger is, of course, one sticks in a new plant and digs up a treasure. 

One good thing about the blog is other bloggers, Chelsea Flower Show standard unlike like me, a gardener fighting nature, pests and the sheer cussedness of plants to not do what you want.
Try https://verbalcompost.blogspot.com/?m=1 .

So, back to a revitalised pond - and some primulas nearby -

with a final flourish - Hilary's rose (I know that is not really its name but as Hilary gave it to us . . . .