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!

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.

Back to work blues

Was today too much like hard work, with the return to work, school or college causing you to crawl out of bed at a snail's pace this morning, and long to go back to bed as soon as possible? Like a lot of people, I found the jolt back to my usual routine unwelcome and abrupt. My sister went back to her care home yesterday, and I always feel blue when she's out of London.

She's the blurry baby on the far left, and the tiny blur in a red coat on the right. It was raining on the day the gold-framed photo was taken.

Of course, it ended up raining today.

A Twitter observation on the blueness of this Monday got me to think about blue flowers. I'd already shared photos of bluebells this morning on Facebook and Twitter, as bluebells symbolise constancy (which I thought would be a comfort, given the unsettling return to work) as well as kindness and gratitude.

But more blue flowers wouldn't go amiss.

So here are some Monday blues. A lot of these are British flowers: bluebells, forget-me-nots, hyacinths, cornflowers, nigella, delphiniums, flax, lavender, muscari, sweet peas and scabious. And there are also roses, gentian, irises, and campanula. I've been a bit licentious about what counts as blue, but so are the people who name flower varieties! Blue flowers often have a fantastic scent as well, which is a lovely bonus. Happy Monday!

British Flowers Week: Eggcups, the new jam jars

It's British Flowers Week again, and my summer flowers are filling my corner of South East London with colour, scent and texture.

Last week I filled three vases (and four eggcups) with them - from scented Harlequin sweet peas that I managed to grow from seed I saved last autumn to self-seeded and deliberately grown nigella, from pretty white alliums that were an experiment in planting unused onions to huge 'Galahad' delphiniums grown from seed, and from French lavender (bought in Mayfield Lavender) to British-grown French marigolds.

I love China blue and white, and so I used this Portmeirion vase and mixed a few blue nigella and flowering physocarpus with the white alliums, delphiniums, ammi majus, and hesperis.

This vase and matching eggcups are so cute - I thought the bright colours of the calendula, cornflowers and osteospermum would suit them. I don't think I'll tire of jam jar posies in a hurry, but eggcup flowers are a wonderful, miniature alternative.

And this lime green glass vase was made for summer flowers. There are plenty more to come. In the meantime, you can read more about British Flowers Week here.

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.