June flower bouquets

A quick check of the calendar. Yep, I’m late for this post. Very, very late.

So I guess I had best sit down and write a note explaining why my essay is late.

Busy.

There.

June is just so insanely busy. Flowers to cut, bouquets to make, berries to pick, lawns to mow. And mow, and mow.

So here you have a selection of some of the bouquets this (past) month.

All the usual suspects. Some monstrous alliums that loved the moist soil for once. Gorgeous tall dianthus.

Oh and this year my roses from Cochet planted a year ago (or a year and a half?) have started to flower.

Not in face smacking while walking past volumes. That’s how I measure my Gertrude Jekyll blooms.

But at least they don’t look as utterly spindly as when I planted them.

Did I plan so many pale yellow one?

Goodness.

And please don’t ask me the names. I’m making lunch, I have the hunger shakes and I don’t want to get distracted and not show you the pretties.

But I will do a proper post about the roses another time.

The sweet peas are a positive jungle of delights. It’s a shame they self seed in the kale patch and up the grape vines in the top of the potager. But you just have to be a bit sporty when you harvest them and hope you don’t fall onto your secateurs reaching too far over to cut.

Wouldn’t that be the perfect epitaph?

She died, impaled on her favourite garden tool, cutting flowers just out of reach.

I needed a few cool and cleansing bouquets after the riot of flowers this June. So I went for some soothing vases of eucalyptus leaves as a sort of visual pause.

That was after I tried to bring in some of my favourite mock orange (deutzia) blossoms.

And spent more time sweeping up fallen petals and being irked, rather than enjoying the scent.

But the market flowers were a riot. Even if I felt like I was dropping petals as I walked up. June flowers are exceptionally ephemeral after all this lush rain.

Pause. I think I’d best stop there. My lentils are boiling dry on the stove.