power plant

I may not have to wait long now before the first signs of Spring… or at least the first signs that winter is coming to an end. But until then I have some forced Forsythia that I cut only a week ago to bring indoors. And it opened just in time for my Monday vase today! I do love seeing the forsythia come into flower outside, but like many shrubs it can be forced to flower early indoors and I have used my Forsythia vase with yellow flowers printed on the glass.   Our snow has (almost) all melted away and it is very soggy and muddy everywhere, but it looks like we will have drier and much milder weather by the end of the week. I can’t wait! I will don my wellies and do some much needed tidying up! The weather in recent days, along with the sound of the crows and jays in the woods, reminded me of this poem by Edward Thomas: THAW Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, What w...

Last autumn, when I started this monthly project of finding five favourite plants in my garden to share, I thought January might be tricky, but I didn’t imagine February would be the hardest month to find anything! Our winter has not been incredibly cold or snowy, but it has been consistently cold, with hardly any days above zero until last week. So I don’t even have a crocus to squeal over yet. But I have found some lovely things (after looking hard!) First of all my pretty witch hazel, Hamamelis ‘Diane’ . Although I haven’t detected any scent yet, she has been flowering well for over a week now. Number two this month is this pretty Hepatica nobilis growing under a plastic dome in the greenhouse. I love these flowers and especially love seeing them in the wild, but in the area we live in now, they don’t like the soil. So I decided to plant one in a pot, to be kept in the greenhouse over winter. That way, when the sun does shine and the flowers open out completely, I can go out ...

Each Monday I join Cathy at Rambling in the Garden for her weekly meme. While Cathy’s late winter garden is looking beautiful, with snowdrops and hellebores in full bloom, we awoke to more snow today, covering any plants that were considering emerging but hadn’t quite decided! Well, fortunately I managed to find some wintery bits and pieces yesterday… My witch hazel ‘Diane’ has been flowering for about a week now, and a small twig could be spared for my ikebana vase. To complement the orangey red, I cut a few red stems of Cornus and felt it made my witch hazel look as if it is in a forest of red-barked trees! The Hellebores at the base are from a plant growing under cover and wrapped in fleece in the greenhouse. I bought this in full flower in the autumn (!), but the early onset of winter in November meant it never got planted out. It is nice to have something in the almost empty greenhouse though, and the flowers are beautiful even when they go over and start to form seeds. I w...

  It is still wintery here, so as I join Cathy at Rambling in the Garden with my Monday vase this week I am sharing my last posy of dried flowers cut from my garden last summer. It is so nice to look at it and think back to the warm and sunny days when I cut these flowers, seedheads and fluffy grasses. (Did you hear that deep sigh? ) I am getting tired of winter (aren’t we all?) and am looking forward to another growing season. And these dried flowers have made it feel as if I have managed to cling to a little piece of summer to tide me over these last few weeks of winter! The Calendula and Helipterum are still my favourites, but I love the Echinops and Scabiosa seedheads too. Many thanks to Cathy for hosting, and inspiring us all to look at our gardens and to cut materials all year round ! Have a great week!  

The title of my post today simply describes the feeling I had in making and now looking at my latest creation with dried flowers. Actually, as I join Cathy at Rambling in the Garden for her weekly meme, I do not have a vase as such this week. Instead, I plucked up the courage and dug out a straw ring I had stashed some years ago, took myself down into the cellar with a hot glue gun, and spent a couple of relaxing hours faffing around with dried flowers! The result: I am very happy with my first attempt. What surprises me most is how colourful it is. If you haven ‘t seen my recent post all about my adventure in drying flowers, do take a look. Just as Cathy’s In A Vase On Monday meme changed the way I choose plants for my garden, this project has once again made me look at the plants I grow from a different angle. What does well in the garden will still take priority, but I also look at what lasts well in a vase and now what dries well and retains its colour. Statice is a natura...