End of a season…

The robins are ‘ticking’ in the hedgerow…

The height of Summer has passed…

And I am now perusing the bulb catalogtues for Christmas paperwhites!!!!!!!

Although calender-wise there is a lot more sun to come and hopefully a glorious Indian summer, the seasons feel they have turned on a slow but sure stroll towards Autumn…

I do love this time of the year.

The chaos of Spring and early summer has relaxed, the heat of mid summer has passed and now there seems more time to take stock and notice the beauty around at the moment…

It has made me take stock as well… and due to many complicated personal reasons I have decided to bring to an end the flowering side of the bloomers business…

It has been a difficult decision as I know that the flowers bring a lot of pleasure to a lot of people, but time is precious at the moment and it needs to be spent with family and friends…

So I am slowing down as well and taking this time to think and plan a new season …

and a new blog…

More news of this to follow in the Autumn…

In the meantime…  a small gift of flowers to thank all of you who have been following the seasons with Bloomers…

Forget-me-not…

Nicola x.

 

Sunshine on a rainy day…

I love the weather we are having at the moment…

Warm sunshine and plenty of rain and…

a spectacular display of lightening yesterday evening at a time when I could watch the show.

Usually storms arrive in the middle of the night.

When , however much I want to watch, I inevitably fall back to sleep!

This time of year the sunlight in the evening begins to filter through the foliage casting shafts of gold , spotlighting tiny details of summer beauty…

Here are a few images that hopefully have captured these transient moments of light…

Nicola X.

 

The smell of roses in the air…

We are now entering the last few days of May … and the weather has turned very warm…

In tune with this time of year all the roses have been waiting in the wings , buds poised at the ready, for just this type of weather to arrive and trigger them to burst into joyful abandon…

 

Their scent has filled the air today, particularly that of the ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ roses, their shocking pink flowers  pouring out the most delicious fruity scent…

There are numerous quotes that I love about roses … here is just one of my favorites…

                                  ’You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,

                                   But the scent of the roses will hang round it still…’

                                                                                                                               (Ibid)

Enjoy your roses…

Nicola x.

 

Time for a change…

The end of May is usually the time to dig out the old and bring in the new…

I always find it frustrating this time of year as a lot of my containers are full of bulbs and I have to fight the temptation to rip off the leaves that are still standing and create a lovely blank canvas for all my new plants waiting in the wings ready to perform, these leaves however are much needed to provide energy for the bulb to flower next year so must be left on , until they fade naturally away…

So I have devised a system where I dig around the bulbs , taking away about a third of the old compost and replace it with fresh …

The old compost goes on any blank spaces on the flower beds as a mulch helping to keep much needed moisture in the soil…

So in the next few days I will be planting out…

Nicotiana, cosmos, phlox, and the soft grey foliage of cineria…

Hopefully a slug won’t eat the lot by next week!

These will all replace pansies and violas… These have been beautiful but are now growing longer and longer stems and are starting to fall over in their enthusiasm to grow.

I can’t bear to waste any flowers though , so I pick them…

and transform them into charming posies with a lovely sweet scent…

Nicola x.

 

Flower of the month…

May is proving to be a blustery month…

It began with sun, sun, sun and then wind, wind, wind!

Not the best growing conditions when you need rain, rain, rain!

Amongst all this weather one flower has stood up to it all…

The garden is full of alliums at the moment, allium ‘purple sensation’ to be exact. They have stood tall and splendidly purple this week amongst the other flowers battered and limp from the wind.

I don’t pick these fresh, the water aquires a bit of an ‘oniony’ pong after a while!

So we  enjoy them and then I allow them to age naturally, when as seedpods I will harvest them for christmas decorations later on in the year…

 

Nicola x.

 

Garden in a teacup…

The Bloomers newsletter went out today offering my customers the chance to book onto a couple of courses I will be running…

There are many courses offered to do with flower arranging and growing cut flowers at the moment , and not that a lot of them aren’t run very well and very enjoyable, but I felt the need to offer something different…

So first we have …’GARDEN IN A TEACUP’… alternative ways to display your garden flowers in the home using vintage containers.. AND… ‘ FLOWERS…GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT’… learn about how to grow and eat edible flowers…

I particularly wanted to offer a course showing people how to use their own garden flowers … very ‘green’ and sustainable and dare I say it … recession proof ! and as I now have a considerable collection of vintage glassware the combination seemed perfect…

Vintage glasses with a single tulip in each…

Anyone interested in booking a place on a course please see the ‘events’ page for dates and contact me at…

blooomers.ncoe@yahoo.co.uk

Nicola x.

 

May!

May really does feel like the beginning of the Summer…

Especially today, wall to wall sunshine…

The forecast is for more of the same to come which is great … until… you are one of the people, like myself, who cultivates plants for a living…

I am sure other parts of the country get more balanced weather, but ours seems to be all or nothing… and apparently we here in rural Essex are the driest part of the country!

So no rain to come for quite a while… so out with the watering cans , which are never a substitute for good old-fashioned rain…

Never mind , musn’t grumble…

The flowers are enjoying the sunshine!

and none more lovely than the native British wild flowers…

England is never so beautiful as it is now in late Spring …

Enjoy!…

Nicola x.

 

Poor man’s Peony…

Double-flowered late tulips really are a poor man’s peony…

At first , as a bud, they simply resemble any other tulip…

Then as they age they open…

Revealing layers of over-lapping ruffled petals…

They have a gentle scent too…

and reliably re-appear each Spring year after year…

A perfect tulip and cut flower!

Nicola x.

 

A rainbow of flowers…

It is very easy this time of year, with the multitude of horticultural jobs that need doing, to forget to enjoy the riot of colour appearing daily…

Red, yellow, pink, blue, purple, orange not to mention the hundreds of different greens that are everywhere…

A pure celebration of flower power…

 

There is a quote from ‘alice through the looking glass’ that seems to sum up well this beautiful time of year…

                            ” Don’t hurry.Don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way…”

Nicola x.

 

Time for tea…

The easter tea party at the weekend was quiet… but the sun shone which I didn’t expect…

Since then it hasn’t stopped and things in the garden are growing inches by the minute!

Part of me loves this time of year but sometimes it seems that everything is rushing and I want to say stop ! Wait for me !… I have waited so long , all winter in fact I want to be able to enjoy all this sudden colour and beauty that surrounds me …

One of the ways to do this is to bring a little bit of it indoors…

I was offering delicate Spring posies arranged in a vintage tea cup for sale at the weekend …

They are a way of enjoying all those flowers whose stems are usually too short to be able to use in a hand-held posy…

Nicola x.