Sunshine, roses, and Emma Bridgewater

The sunshine and warmer weather is a relief after the gloom of last week. I was thoroughly miserable and felt like hibernating until September or whenever the summer decided to turn up. Fortunately I didn't have to wait that long.

The roses and escallonia are out at last, and the nigella and aquilegia have come back again, which is lovely.

I delivered this scented posy full of roses, sage and mint on Saturday, and reused a beautiful Emma Bridgewater bag to keep them safe on the train journey.

I also cut some flowers for me, and used my Black Toast Emma Bridgewater vases and a teeny Jo Malone bottle.

My huge pink Cariad roses are the only David Austin roses I have that have survived the last few years - poor Jude the Obscure and William Shakespeare 2000 have met a sad end. Which is kind of fitting for those writers of tragedies, Thomas Hardy and William Shakespeare.

No use crying...

I saved my first, perfectly-formed delphinium to use in my new, second-hand vase. I arranged it with some white scented hesperis (sweet rocket), white roses and 'Nora Barlow' aquilegia from the garden and greenhouse. But as I turned around so I could move back to quickly photograph it, I heard a crash.

Gutted. After much cursing (sorry neighbours for the morning wake up call) I chucked the flowers in this old, first-hand vase, and they don't look nearly as good.

Mind you, despite being broken in the middle, the delphinium lasted another six days.

On the same morning as Vase-gate, I made a small posy of my flowers for Sara, the Garden Museum's sustainability trainee, who has just left to go on maternity leave. No disasters with that, fortunately! There were calendula, tagetes, aquilegia, and gorgeous-smelling sage and thyme.

And on Saturday I made a posy with another delphinium and my first few nigella.

Pensiveness and peonies

I did two very special "Sorry you're leaving"/"Good luck" gifts this week. I had planned to use forget-me-nots (for obvious reasons) and cowslips for pensiveness, but couldn't get hold of either. In the end, I used new season Sarah Bernhardt peonies, which start off like this...

Before opening a little...

And eventually look like this when fully open. They smell incredible, and they are so fluffy I just want to stroke them like a rabbit!

There were also cerise stocks, green hypericum berries and lilac freesias from the market.

Mixed up with lots of flowers from the garden: the first white, red and peach garden roses, dainty aquilegia, including the exquisite 'Nora Barlow' from Higgledy Garden (which has finally flowered after I sowed the seeds twenty months ago!), lavender 'Folgate', pittosporum 'Oliver Twist', scented white hesperis (a.k.a. sweet rocket - these are autumn-sown from seeds, which I got at the Hardy Cottage Garden Plants stand at the Wisley show), alliums in purple and white, osteospermum, and delicious-smelling herbs such as lemon verbena.

There was plenty to make two similar-but-different bouquets, in reused glass jars.

They were delivered on the bus, in the much-needed sunshine. They went to two surprised lecturers, who seemed happy with them and didn't need cowslips in order to be thoughtful!

Nymans in May

I am sure there are others like me who wanted to visit Nymans after seeing Chris Beardshaw's BBC Four programme about it recently, as part of the British Gardens in Time series. The shameful thing is, I go past it on the way to Brighton if I visit my sister by car, but for some reason 'Nymans' just didn't sound like a garden to me, and I was never curious enough to find out what that brown sign on the M23 was all about.

Well, I visited it a few weeks ago, and I was glad I did! It's a wonderful place - there is a wildflower meadow with oxeye daisies, woods with fantastic carvings, a beautifully colour-coordinated allium, scabious and astrantia bed, a rose garden. Dotted around the gardens were some dainty aquilegias and perfectly spherical alliums - and the bees loved them.

There were a few peachy beauties which caught my eye: the 'Crown Princess Margareta' rose, and the 'Souvenir de Maxime Cornu' tree peony.

My favourite part was the most incredible wisteria-covered walkway. I had no idea wisteria was so scented. The walkway has now made it into my fantasy garden! There was also wisteria going up the house, and an unusual white wisteria near the secondhand bookshop.

My sister doesn't tend to look at things if you point to them or smell flowers if you put them under her nose, but I'd love to take her here one day and see how she responds to the scents. There are many unhelpful generalisations about autism (I would recommend reading 'The Reason I Jump' if you want an insider view of autism), not least that people with autism don't like sensory experiences. It's true my sister doesn't like being in a crowded, noisy shopping centre, but then again, who does?! But she does seem to enjoy the sensation of walking on a beach or in a park, hearing the sea or the birds, seeing the colours and the gentle movements, so I think she would enjoy a trip to Nymans. I'll post again if I manage to take her!

Growing up

There is a lot of growing up being done in the greenhouse. Every time I look, something new has germinated, grown taller, or is about to flower. It's wonderful - especially when you have sweet peas that look like a bird in flight!

These are my Aquilegia 'Nora Barlow'. I planted them last autumn, and over the last few weeks, they have been getting bigger and bigger. I've planted some of them outside, in gaps between shrubs.

This made me smile - the promise of nigella flowers! I also planted these in autumn, and have planted some outside (I feel ever so cautious about planting my lovingly-grown babies outside, as I seem to share the garden with every hungry squirrel, bird and insect in South London!).

These are hopefully Delphinium 'Galahad', and not just weeds.

And these are Nicotiana 'Lime Green'. I sowed too many in this tray and will need to get rid of some.

Cerinthe...

Borage...

Lupin 'Sunrise'. This, the three previous flowers, and the aquilegia were grown from Higgledy Garden seeds.

Panicum 'Frosted Explosion' (a.k.a. fountain grass) - some are two months old and the others were sown a month ago. This was from Sarah Raven seeds, along with the Nigella 'Moody Blues' and Cornflower 'Polka Dot'.

Cleome, which was sown in two lots, like the fountain grass.

Zinnia 'Purple Prince'...

Zinnia 'Early Wonder': new sowings...

...and older ones which are growing up.

'Penny Lane' and 'Genova' dahlias from Shannon's Garden Centre are doing well.

Foxglove 'Milk Chocolate' (but do not eat!) given out at the Macmillan garden at Hampton Court last year.

And chilli seedlings from Wahaca matchsticks, which I planted in the first week of March.

Outside, the Peony 'Bowl of Beauty' has five buds which the ants are crawling over. Claire Austin says this doesn't do the plant any harm, and may in fact help the bud to open.

I moved out the sweet peas to the usual containers, also around a rose bush (climbing up the jasmine trellis), and going up a fence at the back. They are looking feeble in some places (the back garden), but fine and dandy in others (e.g. most of the containers and the trellis). They were all autumn sown, and I got them from Eagle Sweet Peas. There are five varieties, which were meticulously separated and labelled in the greenhouse, but are now a bit mixed up. Sweet pea roulette! The varieties I am growing are Just Jenny, Fields of Fire, Leominster Boy, Dot Com, and Harlequin.

Finally, this Cornflower 'Polka Dot' flowered in the greenhouse yesterday, and I was delighted as it's the only one to survive my autumn sowings. It's so tall and the flower is attracting bees and butterflies already.