23rd June 2022

June flower bouquets

Lindy Garden updates flowers, Potager 0 Comments

Here is something I really want to try and do each month. After all, I am taking these bouquets up to the market on Thursday mornings. And they are the most photogenic thing in the garden.

And if all goes smoothly on a Wednesday, I even make time to photograph the flowers before they get shoved in a basket and then taken to the cool hallway for the night.

That said, I did miss two markets in the past month. Busy with travelling to Andrew one week. And then sciatica last week. Plum suckered me for heavy lifting.

The sciatica is hanging around as much as The Creature likes to do when I’m working in the garden room. She lurks, causes trouble and is known to knock things over.

All done with love of course. She is quite the one for play.

The sciatica? Not so much.

And this week I even had to give in and make my bouquets teensy.

Small enough to fit into glass yoghurt jars instead of the usual sized containers. I just can’t lift a basket that is full of flowers and water and haul them about.

The parking at our weekly market is diabolical. But no doubt the same all over rural France. Our villages were rarely designed to take the number of cars that appear each week. Add in a rather scruffy rural road layout and the insistence of large trucks wanting to drive through the main (very small) thoroughfare of town at the same time as the stallholders need to unload their vans. And we early birds want to get on.

If you arrive soon after eight in the morning you haven’t a hope of a good close parking spot.

And my favourite spot (just below these gates) has been out of bounds for months as the road builders beetle their way through a tricky job of laying a new surface in a space that hasn’t seen much attention since the 19th century.

These are the sort of Ardeche two lane roads that take some courage. You basically have to peer as much as you can in front of you and fang it at speed until you can screech into a passing place and hope you don’t meet Madame Bonnefond coming the other way.

I had to take this off Google maps, as there is no way anyone would stop to take a snap of this humble road. You would probably get rammed by a logging truck behind you, or miss your chance to get along to that green door in the shot which has a squeeze spot.

It’s below the main Catholic church, around the south facing side of the town, and then past one of my favourite streets – chemin sous le thym.

I don’t know why but it makes me think of languid walks and wearing crinoline and carrying a basket of herbs to market.

Especially as is is located right next to one of my favourite town houses.

Ooh let me go down a rabbit hole and try and find a picture of that charming street beside my dream home.

Nope. Not a hope. And sitting at a desk isn’t my thing while a bad back insists on sending pinging jolts down the back of my right leg.

Sigh. Thank goodness for blooms. And the first dahlias turning up.

They still have tiny flower stalks, so not good enough for bouquets. But I leave you with a few more of the month’s flower.

Stalwarts and fillers before the dahlias get going. But charming in their own sweet way.

Oh and have a look at the amazing interloper on the stachys. A pink spider. I think I saw it lurking in the flower bud of the acanthus as well when I was adding them to the largest bouquet. But I’ll be jiggered if I can find it again.