Basil and borage

This is a photo of some basil ice cream I made last week and borage iced-water. Yes, really - ice cream made with basil. I saw that Sarah Raven had posted a recipe for it, and I thought I would make it, since I've been growing basil but don't enjoy cooking. Basil ice cream does sound odd, but then mint chocolate ice cream is well established (I once saw a little boy cry, "But I wanted mint chocolate!" when he was mistakenly given chocolate ice cream at Marrocco's in Hove). Basil isn't so very different from mint, is it? Although in flower language, mint means "warmth" and basil means "hate" - which is why I never use basil in arrangements.

I've never made ice cream before and I don't have a churner, or common sense. I used a liquidiser to blend the ingredients, and probably should have used an electric mixer instead. But I took it out and mixed it after an hour in the freezer, and after another couple of hours it was ice cream. And it was delicious - honestly! I used a quarter of the recipe; I don't entertain much and ice cream isn't exactly the sort of thing I can take to a friend's on overheated London trains.

I've also been making borage ice cubes, which gives water a lovely cucumber taste. I think borage is the most versatile flower I've grown - it looks great in arrangements, the bees love it, it's edible, and it looks pretty decorating food. If you've never used it, consider growing it next year. I got my seeds from Higgledy Garden. I have so many borage plants, I gave some to a friend who needs to attract bees to her garden for some of her vegetables to fruit.

And those of you who are still unsure about using basil in ice cream may be relieved to know that I used homegrown basil, tomatoes and a red pepper to make soup. Does that sound a bit better?

Firework flowers

Lots of things are flowering or about to flower now - Nicotiana 'Lime Green' and borage (from Higgledy), Panicum 'Frosted Explosion' and spring-sown cornflowers (from Sarah Raven's), zinnias, jasmine, sweet peas, roses and phlox. The panicum above and below looks like fireworks or fairies, depending on whether you prefer fairytales or Guy Fawkes' Night.

Sweet peas and roses fill rooms and gardens with scent in the day, but nicotiana and jasmine release their scent at night. Early in the morning, you can smell all of them.

I caved in and cut some panicum and nicotiana, but I'm holding out a bit longer for the beautiful blue borage, phlox and Jude the Obscure roses (which I thought would never flower this year!). 

I love the lime green of the nicotiana - it's the perfect partner for bright zinnias and sweet peas.

The first nigella and roses of the year

After nine months of nurturing, my Nigella 'Moody Blues', which I grew from Sarah Raven's seeds, began to flower this month. Nigella are a beautiful, fairy-like flower that I never came across when I did my floristry course or when I worked for other florists. I think they deserve to be used more often - they are such a delicate-looking flowers, but last well in water. Here is my first one, along with a couple of early sweet peas.

The first roses began to flower too, and the scent hits you as soon as you step outside.

I was longing to make my first garden rose and nigella posy of the year! I added lots of sweet-smelling herbs - both lemon thyme and flowering orange thyme, and last year's apple mint (which is doing even better this year) and lavender mint. Combined with the scent of the roses, this is a posy that fills a room.

The odd bits of thyme, rosebud and nigella were used in a tiny Tiptree jar. I don't like wasting flowers! The rest of the flower waste gets thrown on the compost heap.

Since I don't like flower waste, I got these from my lovely local florist, Julie at the Grove Park florist shop. She was going to throw them out, and didn't want to take money for them, but I did manage to pay her a little for them. I've talked about how difficult it is to manage a flower shop before - one day you sell out of everything, but another day you end up throwing half of your stock out.

As ever, my message is: please buy flowers and plants from your florist or garden centre when possible, and not from a big supermarket. Or grow your own!

Here Comes the Sun

The mildest winter I can remember seems to be coming to an end...although, this being Britain, there could be a late freeze on the way! In my optimism, I have begun to sow some zinnias, fountain grass, and cleome in the greenhouse.

In the first half of February, there were still roses and juicy-red rosehips, sage and viburnum.

The crocuses almost drowned in the swamp of a winter garden, but there were enough to add some colour to the grey and brown, and to cut for a tiny vase.

Now they've gone, and the narcissi and hyacinths are about to take their place. The hyacinths have lasted three years and several moves.

My muscari looked like they were going to flower months ago, but there has just been a lot of leaves. Now the narcissi and tulips have caught up, and many of them look on the cusp of flowering. I'm hoping the Bridal Crown narcissi (front row, middle) flower - I saw them at Chelsea in 2012 and they looked beautiful, but mine didn't flower last year...probably because I tried to force them indoors in a freezing cold flat!

The Honeymoon tulips didn't flower last year, so I'm ever so excited to see this now. And the beautiful, variegated foliage of the Chinatown tulips offered so much promise last year, so I am hoping they deliver flowers this year! Most of the bulbs were bought at the RHS Wisley show in 2012, from Bridgend-based Pheasant Acre Plants.

In other news, the Moody Blues nigella (from Sarah Raven) are still looking good, and in the last week, the Higgledy Garden Nora Barlow aquilegia have grown a little more. The cornflowers are looking decidedly ill though. so I don't think I'll get any flowers from my autumn-sown seedlings. I'll have to try my luck with spring sowings instead.

The autumn-sown sweet peas are looking ok, and hopefully they will fare better than the spring sowings I attempted with no joy last year. I know it's too early to move them outside, but I got impatient looking at my sweet pea pots, which are all ready for new plants, so I planted a couple. I'm just curious to see what will happen!

There are two hanging baskets filled with forget-me-nots - blue in one and pink in the other. They are from the wonderful Shannon's Garden Centre in Forest Hill, and the idea of forget-me-not hanging baskets came from Seedball.

I bought a few pots of bluebells to see how they grow - one pot of English bluebells and one pot of pink Spanish bluebells. The Penny's Pink hellebores are still doing well. And finally, I spotted lots of new growth in the garden, including these sedums. Come on, springtime!

Garlic and Sapphire

This is just a quick post to point you in the direction of Sarah Raven’s blog, which I’ve just written a post for (on the subject of flower meanings…quelle surprise), and her Pinterest page, which I only discovered this week. Both are full of beautiful inspiration for florists, gardeners, cooks and bakers.

Sarah Raven’s gardens at Perch Hill

After several calendar clashes, I went to the Perch Hill open day at the end of July. I’ve been dreaming about seeing Sarah Raven’s dedicated cutting garden since I read her book The Cutting Garden when I first got into floristry a few years ago.  She got me into gardening the same way that Jane Packer got me into floristry. The book, which I’ve talked about before, is a delight to read or to flick through as you please. There are arrangements for every season, from a big, bright summer urn of eremurus, agapanthus, delphiniums and marigolds to a winter collection of glass bottles with aconites, witch hazel and crocuses. There is a mini encyclopaedia of cutting flowers and foliage, organised by season and colour, with suggestions for particular cultivars for colour or scent. There are also plans for cutting gardens with recommendations for what goes where – this inspired me to make three pyramids in huge pots to grow sweet peas. And although they didn’t do well this year because of the cold and my late planting of them, last year all three pyramids did magnificently and gave me sweet peas all summer long.

So, Perch Hill. You can’t see much from outside, because of hedges that have been planted to break the wind and create some shade. But when you go through an opening in the hedge, all of a sudden there are gardens all ahead of you, either side, and sweet peas growing up a beautiful arch (with seats in the middle). There are different-themed gardens, including a vegetable garden with cosmos scattered around it, a dedicated cutting garden stuffed with dahlias and nicotiana, and a Venetian-inspired garden full of jewel-like colours. There are zinnias (including the stunning lime-green and appropriately-named ‘Envy’), alliums, bright blue 'Black Knight' delphiniums, three varieties of tall and stately artichokes, lots of dill, and sweet peas aplenty, as well as dainty heartsease and borage.

The glasshouse is on top of a slope; the shop, café and a greenhouse full of vegetables are all inside. There is clever planting all down the slope, so that plants such as lavender and rosemary, which don’t like to sit in soggy soil, can enjoy the rain but the water will run off.

Sarah gave a guided tour of Perch Hill, which was such a treat! I was especially interested in hearing about how they get their seeds to germinate and how they deal with rain, as their soil there is heavy and clay, as is ours, so I was keen to hear tactics for this problematic soil. When it was still cold and it was pouring with rain for days on end in the late spring, our garden was like a swimming pool, direct-grown seeds didn’t germinate and several shrubs died. The visit to Sarah Raven’s gardens gave me hope that next year will be a better one for me, flower-wise.

I took all of the photos in this post on the open day in July, from the cut flowers in glass bottles to the hanging poppy seed heads to the exciting label for trial dahlias.The next open day is this Saturday, so if you want to go somewhere flower-filled and inspiring this bank holiday weekend, this is it!