British Flowers Week 2018: Yellow cosmos

My computer is being mended, so I can't use it to write or to upload or edit photos, and yesterday turned out to be a pretty awful day. So I didn't post as planned.

But it's a new day now, and even though I'm just using a camera phone and filters, and I'm posting using my mobile, I want to share pictures of my first yellow cosmos.

I grew cosmos a few years ago, and it amazed me how a £2 pack of seeds could produce buckets of flowers all through summer and right into November. They are such versatile flowers and the movement they add is wonderful - they dance around in the garden and the vase. The only problem I sometimes have is the pollen dropping - but that can be remedied by a quick, gentle spray with hairspray or artist's fixative.

I think I first saw yellow cosmos when Mike Rogers posted photos of his Xanthos cosmos and I thought pale yellow would make a nice change from white and pink, and yellow seems to amplify the Victorian meaning of cosmos: joy. You can read Mike's blog here.

So here are my yellow cosmos with pink sweet peas, in an old diffuser bottle. I love pink and yellow - it's such a cheerful combination.

British Flowers Week 2018: Canterbury bells

After a couple of years of nurturing and patience, my Canterbury bells, which I grew from Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants seeds, flowered this year.

I used campanula for Mother's Day a few years ago - you can read about their symbolism here, and why they are a lovely flower to give to someone.

And here they are now with scented roses and pink escallonia from the garden.

British Flowers Week 2018: Not quite orange blossom

Today's post is about philadelpus, also known as mock orange because it has an incredible scent like orange blossom. It grows tall and it looks beautiful against a clear blue sky. It also looks gorgeous massed together in an arrangement.

It looks beautiful on its own or mixed with a couple of other colours. In the picture below it's with physocarpus.

Close up:

Here it is with delicate nigella (which I no longer have this year after a fox or two jumped all over them...I was not impressed!):

I wanted to use a Snapple bottle because of the Clueless line: "I gave him my lemon Snapple and I took his sucky Italian roast." The character Cher uses her unwanted thermos of coffee to try to set up two teachers on a coffee date.

This was for British Flowers Week a few years ago - with white alliums, jasmine, and ammi. The beautiful jar is orange blossom honey from Tiptree. And the lovely scent of mock orange and jasmine overpowers the not-so-nice scent of alliums!

British Flowers Week 2018: Sweet peas

British Flowers Week starts today, so I thought I'd try to post every day this week. Starting off with a small gardening victory.

I met up with Sara from My Flower Patch and her husband when they came to London for a few days back in March. It was snowing and cold so we found a nice tapas restaurant in Bloomsbury and stayed there in the warm all afternoon. She told me about the planning and organising ahead of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show - Sara is a member of Flowers From The Farm and they had their first stand at the show in May. I didn't envy her - it sounded like so much hard work. It paid off in the end as they won a gold medal!

When Sara asked me what I was growing this year, I told her I'd planned to sow sweet peas but I had left it too late. She told me a tip (which I think Gill Hodgson, who founded Flowers from the Farm, had passed on to her) which was to sow them in the small pots you get from a takeaway, on damp kitchen paper or cotton wool pads, and keep them indoors until they germinate. She said if I was lucky I would have flowers in September!

So the week after that, I washed all the pots after a Friday night thali from the local Sri Lankan grocery, I lay folded strips of kitchen paper inside each one, added a few drops of water so they were damp, and spaced out a few sweet pea seeds inside every pot. Then put the lids on and placed them on a window sill above a radiator. I checked them each day, and if they were drying up I added a few more drops of water. It was kind of like growing cress on blotting paper at school, except these were covered. And I never got excited about eating cress, whereas I do get excited about cutting sweet peas for a vase.

After a week, most of the seeds had germinated. I planted them in small, tall pots.

Fast forward three months and I have my first sweet peas flowering! The stems are a bit stumpy; unlike the amazing long stems I've grown before from winter sowings.

But they're pretty and they smell gorgeous.

The day after Helen died, I took some flowers round for her parents and nieces. I had cut some hellebores, apple mint, and bluebells from the garden and bought British sweet peas, narcissi, and tulips. I hoped the gentle scent would be comforting and not overwhelming or even irritating. Fortunately, Helen's mother said it was nice to have flowers again because they'd had to throw out the wilted ones which were given when Helen was ill.

It's hard to find the motivation to do things when you're troubled or when you're grieving. When I visited Helen's parents after the funeral, her mother told me that she didn't feel like gardening, and I could really empathise. I asked if she'd like some plants because I had too many, and she said OK. So the next time I went round, I took some sweet peas and cosmos. I went round last week and saw the sweet peas are in a beautiful homemade wigwam, and the cosmos are in the flower bed. Busy Lizzies are planted up in containers hanging from the fence, and the garden is looking lovely and loved. We talked about Helen and there's sadness and anger and confusion and guilt. But there's tenderness and tiny pieces of joy as well.

Sweet peas mean delicate pleasures in the Victorian language of flowers, but I've just seen that they also symbolise departure. This feels especially poignant this year. I also have another friend in mind - I don't want to name them in case they don't want me to, but I know they're going through a hard time now and sweet peas are special flowers for them.

For all of the healing these flowers can bring, I'm glad I managed to grow them. So thank you for the nudge, Sara.

Who wants to live forever?

Vicky's first anniversary was last weekend. The date she died is hard to forget anyway, but it's especially noticeable because it happened to be the same day as the London Bridge attack.

I was on a train back from Oxford, where I'd visited my friends and their two adorable young daughters. They had built a greenhouse from plastic bottles that they'd collected over time and I was amazed to see that it had withstood storms and snow and was being used to house vegetable plants. I noticed a missed call and a voicemail when my friends' eldest asked me to get my phone and take a photo of the afternoon tea that she had helped to make. I knew the voicemail was bad news and I didn't want to listen and suddenly be weird, tearful or panicked in front of the girls. I told my friend I needed to leave soon, so we all had tea and twenty minutes later I was in his car on the way to the train station. I listened to the message and phoned Vicky's sister and told her I would be there as soon as I could. But as I was on the train back to Paddington I got a call to say Vicky had just died.

I felt a bit lost. I walked to the sphinx by Cleopatra's Needle and sat between the paws of my favourite one. I phoned a bereavement counsellor friend from St Christopher's Hospice, and even though he was at a stag do, he took five minutes to sober up a bit and phoned me back. At one point he told me I was in shock. I find it very powerful to hear someone tell me when I'm in shock because, I suppose, I don't realise myself. I could see that as rubbish as things were, I was very fortunate to have a support group of friends who were conversant in the awful language of grief. I still am - and many of those friends have supported me again this year during Helen's illness and after her death.

I walked east along the river, wandered around the City and saw the roses outside St Paul's. I kept walking until I got tired, then got a train home. I didn't watch the news and I didn't look at social media, so I had no idea what had happened in Southwark.

A few days after Vicky's funeral, I walked around Southwark and suddenly came across the sea of wilting flowers and the wall of supportive messages written on candy-coloured Post-it notes.
This year, I cut some of the scented flowers and herbs that Vicky had liked - roses, mock orange, and sage. I made a posy in a Tiptree jam jar in memory of Vicky. It was Victoria Plum jam, the perfect jar for her. And for the last few days I've been listening to the Queen song that played out Vicky's funeral and reduced many people to an emotional wreck: Who Wants to Live Forever.