I trust you all have read Elizabeth and her German Garden and understand the aptness of me wandering around in a curious fog, examining all my flowers carefully with no lasting knowledge or understanding. It's a great book. Basically she, Elizabeth, has a massive house and rambles around the outside of it, wondering what all the plants are. I should reread it myself. The thing is, about gardening, of course it would be good to have knowledge, to read and to understand what on earth it is that you are doing. Of course. But, well, as I've said before, my great glorious stack of interesting gardening books and magazines sits there the way a lot of stuff in my life does, calling to me in a mocking guilt laden way. I always turn away from them, the books that is, and go stand in my doorway, trying to discern what sort of something whatever it is might be.
Of course, I'm not completely ignorant. I can tell the difference between a day lily and cosmos, between rhubarb and raspberry. But mostly everything is a charming, nameless surprise. Like this. So delicate! So lovely! No idea what it is though.
One of these is a morning glory, the only remaining morning glory. After so carefully planting a whole packet of morning glory seeds, when they did come up, I painstakingly pulled them up, thinking they were weeds, but stopping short of this single vine. Matt was most annoyed.
These are recurring marigolds. Another interesting surprise. I thought marigolds had to be redone every year. What's the word I'm looking for….annual? I thought they were annuals. But these come back, it seems, in strength and brilliance even.
Roses, I can basically do roses. Except this year every single rose is struggling. Is it the weather? I look at them anxiously every morning. But the holly hock, gosh, it's almost sinful how tall and glorious it is.
And these two were presents. Aren't they lovely? I was killing them, knowing in some distant way that they needed to be in the shade but not actually putting them there. Suddenly, on a hot day, rescued them and now they have fully recovered.
There's more, of course, but I fear you will grow weary. It's better that I leave something for another time, and go do something important, like the laundry, which should have an ugly word come before it, but this is supposed to be a kind hearted blog, and so I will leave any kind of word like that to your imagination.
Pip pip.
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