Flowers for the house

I’ve just realized that I’m eating my day backwards.  It’s post dinner and I’m having stewed apples with yoghurt for dessert. And I started my day with a cheese board and bread.

Ah well. It’s all delicious. And the breakfast was a hearty one as I woke up for the first time in THREE WEEKS not sluggish from a broken night of coughing.

Oh yes, the 2017 Everyone Has The Hacking Cough Cold.  It is so tahsome.  But I had a faint glimmer of life as a sprightly gardener this morning and it was marvellous.

I flew out the door as soon as my translation work (Geopark des Monts d’Ardèche) was done and emailed to the brochure layout guy.

First big task for the day was my favourite. Flahs for the hiss.

I always come over Stately Home owner when it comes to picking flowers for the house. And for the market. It’s just so much fun and privileged to be able to roam about this huge garden picking pretties.

My tulips are exceedingly wacky this season.  So the foliage to try and calm down the vases comes courtesy of the quince blossom and leaves. So pale a green with touches of pink which sort of talk to the wackier parrot tulips.

And at long last I have found a use for that rather garish new growth on the photinia red robin. It is mixed in here with some Japanese quince I looted from my neighbour’s monster patch near his well.

Is it photinia? Excuse me while I plunge into an image search.

Yep. Way too loud in a mixed hedge. I’m even thinking of planting something in front of the larger of the two photinias in my hedge at the boundary of the property so the red doesn’t scream so loudly among the gentle greens of spring.

But that is only something that occurs to me in spring when the whoosh of new red growth makes you stop in your tracks and say: ‘Really? do you have to be that garish?’