What a wedding!!

Kate looked absolutely stunning in her beautiful Alexander McQueen dress.

Delicate english flowers including lily of the valley!! Good guess!

I love that all the flowers and foliage were British sourced and even from their private estates, the abbey looked incredible and I loved the trees.  Here's to locally grown english flowers and a revival of the language of flowers, for those romantic messages in wedding bouquets.

I wish you could smell these ...

The woods where we live smell divine at the moment.

I find it incredible how something so tiny can have such an amazingly powerful scent. Stunning in wedding bouquets in April and May.

The question is will these little beauties be featuring in the Royal wedding flowers???

Todays beauties

Or what's left of them after this heat!!

Happy Easter

Posts have been few and far between of late, as I try and keep my head above water! Juggling my job and tending to all my little babies (seedlings, in case you were wondering!) hasn't left much time for computering, but I promise to try and do better. This weather has been amazing, if not slightly bizarre when you remember we are only in April, but has meant hours of watering in order for anything to stand a chance so early in the season.

However, the garden is looking very lush at the moment with plenty starting to burst in to flower, even if slightly early and lots of seedlings ready to go in the ground. I'm hoping for a very productive flower season, and of course a little rain please, at this rate I will have monkey arms by the end of the summer from carrying all the watering cans!

 I love the way the dew collects on the leaves of Alchemilla mollis.

The wisteria is in full flower and looks and smells gorgeous.

My favourite flower/foliage at the mo, the stunning Viburnum opulus, can't get enough of it!

The hubby's alliums are now bursting in to flower but I'll let him tell you about that A Gardeners Life For Me

 The simple beauty of Soloman seal.

 And a sneak peek at the garage/workshop that is under construction!!

What a weekend

It has been a fantastically sunny weekend for gardening, but we also managed to squeeze in a morning visit to Sissinghurst. Beautiful at any time of year but spring is my favourite (although I will then be saying the same about summer and autumn at the time, I'm so fickle!)
A riot of colour, masses of tulips, narcissi, muscari, fritillaries, blossom, magnolia, wallflowers the list is endless.

Well worth a visit!

And breathe ...

What a weekend! Very little sleep, endless orders and a lot of caffeine was consumed in the shop.

Thought I'd share with you a few extra bits that I did this weekend.

Firstly some pics from the pub, plenty of spring in vintage bottles.

And spring bouquets full of narcissi, hyacinths, hellabores, tulips and beautiful home grown fritillaries and anemones.

And of course a beautiful spring bouquet of tulips and ranunculus with herbs for my own wonderful mum, x.

Yay flowers for a Monday

Jane at Small but Charming is hosting a flower party today (I've got the right week this time!)

As well as a few rather sad stems of forsythia, of which I decided not to share, we have various little bottles of spring dotted around the house.

You may recognise the anemones from the polytunnel, they are now gracing our bedroom window sill.

Spring flowers are the perfect size for my endless little bottles.

I can't resist cutting blossom to enjoy inside, this particular variety only lasts a few days once cut, but what a gorgeous couple of days and then we have such pretty confetti EVERYWHERE!

Enjoy your flowers everyone.

Spring forward...

We spent a gorgeous weekend in the garden, being ever so productive. We are now in to the dangerous cycle of losing track of time and not getting anything else, other than gardening, done now the clocks have gone forward, tonight we were out till 7pm and still could have kept going!

Well I'm hoping I won't regret my impatience, but sweet peas have now been planted outside, gasps I hear... but they were getting a bit tall for the rootrainers and I have been hardening them off by night.

However, I'm obviously not totally relaxed with my decision as I have wrapped all my little babies in fleece for their first night!!!

Spring has most definitely sprung now.

And a very content hound now that the sun is shining!

It's the little things that make me smile...

Actually, if I'm honest, make me squeal with excitement!! I was very excited to finally have the first of the anemones in the tunnel flowering. Not much else to go with them, but they will be picked at the weekend and enjoyed indoors.

I know, it's not really a very exciting picture, I promise to do better at the weekend!

An exhausting but satisfying day!

Bizarrely it feels good to be sitting here barely able to move after an exhausting day in the garden. When every muscle in your body aches you realise how long the winter has been!
Among other things, I have done mass planting of dahlias today, in pots in the polytunnel to start them off, hopefully I may be able to get a few cuttings from them too before they go in the ground.
The dahlias arrived this week from Rose Cottage Plants and Peter Nyssen and there are some stunners!

Ice cube

Seduction

Eveline



Karma Choc

Purple Haze

Karma Serena

I also purchased maroon Rip City, purple Thomas A Edison (highly recommended by Sarah Raven), orange Mrs Eileen and Lemon Bilbao. I can't wait to start using these in summer bouquets.