Garden Centre

Friday, May 11, 2012

Garden without rain

It’s been impossible to take pictures without rain for the past week, and today, although it’s not raining, there are clouds building up, so I rushed out to grab a quick series of snapshots.



The parrot tulips have been extraordinary this year - the gales and hail and flood-level inundations have bothered them not a bit: unstaked and unfazed they have flowered magnificently. Soon these immense petals with start to drop and that will be it for the year, but for the couple of weeks I have them, parrot tulips are just a superb investment and a joy to observe.



Less joyful is this insipid planting. The forget-me-nots are self-seeding and I just pull them out where I don’t want them and leave them where I do. The pink bluebells are a nuisance though: I don’t like the colour, which reminds me of the girdles my great-grandmother use to wear (and complain about) and I thought I’d dug them all out, but obviously not – I shall have to get out there with a fork and remove them before they fade and I lose their location.



I didn’t plant pink bluebells, in case you think I’m really perverse. They should have been blue, but they came up pink! And in the middle of what I thought would be a lively display of blue on blue on blue - a blue iris that has, for reasons mysterious to me, been eaten by slugs or snails. I've never had iris eaten by gastropods before ...

Labels: bluebells, pink flowers, tulip planting

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:52 AM

---