July Flowers

I was inspired by Polly over at Nice Kind of Blue to gather a sample of each flowering plant in our garden today and photograph them together; I was fortunate to have some assistance in my efforts - although it also meant that I didn't really get a say about the layout.



Coco taking care of the samples as we made our way around the garden...



It's been such a joy watching the garden grow this year and we are on the verge of having sweet peas and scabious and salvia and helleniums, although we've already said goodbye to so much too; the stunning iris', the alliums, tulips, hellebores...




It's a funny old business gardening, I wonder if I'll ever feel like I know what I'm doing; but I appreciate our space so much. Even when it feels like the weather hasn't been great we still seem to be out there everyday; Henry pottering and never tiring of playing with buckets of water*, Coco in her own little world sorting out the pegs from the washing line or bouncing on the trampoline, we are starting to harvest lettuce and peas and we've had a couple of strawberries too. On Saturday we cooked kebabs over the fire and let the children stay up until dusk while we sat around enjoying the warmth from the fire as day cooled down.
It's just good to have that outside space - even if the tube rumbles by every 10 minutes or so at the bottom of the garden.
I didn't have a garden growing up and to be honest I didn't mind at all... but maybe it was more that I didn't know what I was missing.

I still haven't done a full story-of-our-garden post - but there are a couple of old posts that give a little insight into what our garden was like before.


May 2011 - no grass/grass
March 2012 - and a year later... a few very small plants.

* We've actually had to resort to shutting down the supply to the outside tap to stop Henry from running up the most enormous water bill and/or single-handedly causing a drought across the Thames valley as he turns the tap on continuously and will fill trugs, buckets, watering cans and anything else he can get his hands on.