Green leaves shine
Yellow flowers billow
Veins accentuate shape
Dark green splendor
Ladies mantel peeks out
Shy, pale green collars
Ready to catch water droplets
Flowers begin to turn to seed.
Mature summer garden.
Foliage
Tag: Gardening
Medicinal garden
At Ford Green Hall there is a small medicinal garden, various herbs are grown there including oriental poppies, marjoram, lavender, mint, teasle and other plants including apples and wild flowers.
I wish I could get some things to knit and heal my foot and ankle. Maybe I should have collected some seeds while I was there. The wet weather has made cottage garden plants really big and blousy. Life is interesting how medicinal plants like feverfew and valerian can help with illness. Not everything is safe to take, but it’s good that medicines have plants as a basis for remedies and cures.
Lavender
Lavender, lovely flower, place for bees to sip and feed. Likes hot and dry conditions. The aromatic oils create a delightful scent. Growing in fields of purple and green. Row upon row of beautiful flowers. People still make little bags of lavender flowers to sit under their pillows and help with sleep.
I have tried to grow it but it’s too damp and shady in our garden. I might grow a small plant, but it never flourishes like these plants in the photo.
I remember having a rockery at my childhood home. I think we had lavender growing in pockets of soil in it. It thrived in hot summers when the sun was baking hot.
Blooming
Well the plants are getting well watered by the rain that has poured down here from the start of July after a hot June.
I wish I could send some of this rain south East towards the Mediterranean and its Islands. Plus Portugal and North Africa where there have been more wildfires. People have died. Meanwhile we are dripping wet.
I’m not complaining, as things go I prefer a cooler summer but I’m not sure how the climate will change in the future. We has grass fires here last year…. I would like to think if we can get our act together climate disaster can be avoided
Lilies and cats
Lilies are beautiful flowers, but when I grow them I put them at the back of the border away from where the cats go. That is because they contain toxins that are dangerous to cats and dogs.
The Internet says :
Both calla lilies and peace lilies contain insoluble crystals of calcium oxalates (insoluble means the crystals don’t dissolve in water). When a cat or dog chews on or bites the plant, the crystals are released and directly irritate the mouth, tongue, throat, and esophagus.16 Sept 2021
So be careful what plants you grow, and try and be aware of what can be dangerous to your pets.
The yard
Very leafy, I need to pot some small flowering plants on but not while my arm is shaking and sore. I’ll try and use some pain killers to stop it hurting so much. Hubby has dumped a big bag of compost in the way and I need to get it moved so I can get further up the yard. Some of these plants survived the winter, they are very leafy, to be honest I could move them into the main garden but I don’t have the energy and there are some dodgy steps as you walk round the back. I must get hubby to get some sand and cement to replace some loose bricks.
Little poppy
I had a lovely afternoon out so I gave my friend this small painting to say thank you. It’s only about three inches square. We had gone to a garden center so I felt it would be nice to give her something floral. Poppies are my favourite flower, vibrant and silken looking. This is a simple painting in acrylic. Drops of dew or rain sit on the petals and shimmer in the light. A bud ready to burst sits next to the flower with it’s promise of further beauty.
Wild flowers in town
Wild flowers sewn at a local car wash a few years ago are a riot of colours and shapes now. They haven’t been cut back and each year the crop gets more varied and colourful. I hadn’t seen the yellow spikes of flowers until this year. Unusually we have had a lot of rain recently and I think that has encouraged a spurt of growth.
Simple rose.
Some flowers are very complex and can also be bred with double the petals, they look very pretty. But bees and pollenating insects can’t get at their nectar and pollen. A massive bloom could make it difficult for bees to feed and collect food for their grubs.
So try and choose bee friendly plants, they often are labelled to help you chose them. And look for simple flowers like this where the central flower parts, anthers, stamens etc are easily accessible by the insects you want to attract.
You can also build bee hotels for solitary bees from grasses and sticks and small lengths of hollow bamboo. If you look you can find designs on line to work to. Have fun and support your local bees! I was speaking to a beekeeper today. He said one honeybee only makes about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime!
Rhododendrons are lovely
But they don’t last long. The huge clusters of blooms soon brown and fade. They are great at the right time of the year, but then they are just big green bushes and they need underplanting to make them look more interesting. Here there are wild buttercups and ferns which were just growing below the rhododendrons. Mostly they shade out other plants and in some places they are cut back and removed because they are not native to the UK and they can spread and can be invasive. The shade they cast stops native saplings growing.
Mallaband-Brown 