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My Miscanthus are simply beautiful at the moment, and have been waving to me all week. So as we wave goodbye to ‘summertime’ (we turned the clocks back here in Germany this weekend too) my Miscanthus are waving in my vase today. Hello ‘wintertime’! Winter is actually nowhere in sight thank goodness, and as you can see I still have some tough little Japanese Anemones (Honorine Jobert) and even a Cosmos (Purity). The other white flowers in this Czech crystal vase are the asters I used last week: Aster ageratoides ‘Aschvi’. I love the very faint pink tinge to Honorine as seen above, and on the bud in this next photo… Some yellow flowers bring out the centres of the anemones nicely – golden Chrysopsis ‘Sunnyshine’ … …and a lonesome sunflower nestled into a fresh Alchemilla mollis flower.  There is also some yellow Tansy hidden at the back. The crystal vase was bought in my year abroad during my studies, many moons ago!  We went to Prague with several classes from the s...

  Another week has flown by and I am joining Cathy at Rambling in the Garden for her lovely meme again. Cathy invites us to join her every Monday in sharing something from our gardens, in a vase. Well, as I look towards winter I am making the most of still having flowers and materials to bring indoors. So this week I again have several vases to share, but have linked them together with a theme: AUTUMN . The centre piece is my small ikebana dish with Euonymus and Hawthorne berries, Viburnum foliage, and three seedheads of Queen Anne’s Lace in various stages of decay. In my red autumn vase I have grouped some grasses – several different Miscanthus, some Stipa gigantea, Sporobolus and some Zebra grass. A tiny vase has a few of the last flowers that are dotted around the meadow. I had to look for these, but I knew there were a few left from my walks with Anouk through the tall grass that is now collapsing and turning brown; a Knapweed flower, a moon daisy and a small white Ach...

I am joining in with the SOS crew (Six on Saturday) this week, hosted by Jim at Garden Ruminations . This meme is simply about sharing six garden-related things on a Saturday. I thought it would be nice to share some of the lovely autumn colour in the garden right now. We are surrounded my mainly conifers, but our own trees and shrubs are now large enough to stand out in the landscape. 1. First of all our Amber Tree, Liquidambur styraciflua. It has been here for four years now, on the edge the flower garden, and is finally filling out a bit. The autumn colour is absolutely stunning. (Click any photo to enlarge) 2. The Hornbeam trees in the driveway are turning golden. I have mentioned before that a few of them hang on to some of their leaves throughout the winter. They also vary in changing colour in autumn – some only just have a few yellow leaves, whereas this one is at its peak. 3. In the hedges we have lots of colour too. Here is one of the Viburnum opulus. The berries are ...

I decided to limit myself to a less dramatic colour scheme for my vase this week, after posting a purple and orange one last Monday. While looking around the garden beds on Sunday afternoon I was soooo tempted to add a Tithonia… sadly too late now as we had frost again last night! I chose blue. But realized only when editing the photos that all the flowers in this vase are actually varying shades of purple… the very blue Nigella in the centre makes this very evident. So, a purple vase with blue accents! Aren’t Nigella such photogenic flowers… this one below is more grey than blue. The asters are fabulous right now. There are two dark purple ones in my vase, one of which is Barr’s Blue (the other I am not sure) and the pale blue one in the background below is a definite favourite again this autumn. Its name here is ‘Silberteppich’ and it really does have a silver sheen to it. I added a couple of sprigs of blue salvias and some Cosmos foliage – a Cosmos ‘Purity’ that simply ref...