Poppy & Peonies

It’s my favourite time of year when the garden roses are starting to bloom. You can’t see a better selection of roses than at the National Trust property, Mottisfont, where the stunning walled garden has the national collection of old fashioned roses. It’s heavenly!

It’s a truly beautiful place with hundreds of different varieties of roses all under-planted with herbaceous plants - inspiring if you’re planning a new garden like me and want to grow lots of roses but also want a garden with year-round interest.

Naturally, I forgot my camera!! So these images snapped on my i-phone don’t really do the roses justice. But oh, if you could just scratch and sniff this Constance Spry rose, or this Reine de Violettes. A-mazing. If only you could get roses like these from the flower market instead of the unscented, mass-produced, straight-stemmed varieties I work with a lot.

We bumped into head gardener Jonny too, whose blog Cuttings from the Garden, is worth a read for a behind the scenes view on life in a National Trust garden.

Hello. How are you? I can’t believe how long it’s been since I last wrote here. So much has happened over the past few months, this poor blog has been neglected. And don’t even get me started on the allotment and my new ‘cutting garden’, which is still resembling a large, sparse area of earth! Let’s just say we are majorly behind!

We have been having HUGE building work done to our house; camping with family members, while walls were ripped down and new rooms built. Living with clouds of dust and rubble is not pleasant and much more stressful than I ever imagined. But at last, life is starting to settle.

This pretty spring wedding I did a few weeks ago now. The bride wanted it to be a rainbow of vibrant, seasonal colour. Just what was needed after that long, cold winter we’ve just survived. Happy spring everyone!

Dahlia Cafe au Lait

This will be my third year growing flowers for cutting and I have to admit I’ve developed a slight obsession with dahlias! I just can’t get enough of them. The colours, the shapes, the incredible beauty. They really are the most fabulous flowers both in the garden and in a vase. When you first plant that knarly tuber it’s almost unbelievable to imagine that after a few months it offers some of the most beautiful flowers that you could ever wish to grow.

Dahlia Edinburgh

Dahlia Fascination

I’ve just placed a dahlia order from Rose Cottage Plants. I think they offer a brilliant selection of tubers, at great prices too. And many varieties are RHS medal winners. Do you like the ones I’ve selected to grow this year? It was so hard to make a selection, I wanted to grow them all! I just hope these varieties will prove good for cutting.

Dahlia Geerlings Babette

Dahlia Ice Cube

Dahlia La Recoleta

I can’t wait to get these beauties planted up in pots ready for the warmer weather when they’ll go in the ground. My challenge this year is learning how to keep my dahlias over the winter – most of last year’s tubers seem to be rotting in my damp shed, maybe I should have left them in the ground. I’m thinking about enrolling on this Dahlia Masterclass course at my favourite flower farm Green and Gorgeous in Oxfordshire. It sounds perfect for a dahlia obsessive like me to learn a thing or two!

Dahlia Mom’s Special

Dahlia Thomas A Edison

Dahlia Wizard of Oz

I love the fresh start that January brings. As all the seed catalogues start dropping through my letterbox, I’ve been planning and dreaming. What to grow on my cutting patch this year, what to grow in my new garden? So many plans to make. As a starting point, I’ve been reflecting on last year. What worked, what did I love, what did I see that inspired me…

Blue Boy Cornflowers on the allotment flowered nearly all summer. This year the shed is getting a paint job, it’s time for a change!

This David Austin Munstead Wood rose is one of the first things I’ll be planting in my new garden. Deep crimson, velvety petals and it smells amazing too.

These fabulous delphiniums were growing at RHS Wisley. They made a stunning sight. Will my delphiniums ever be this impressive?

Despite last year’s terrible growing conditions due to all the rain and lots of failures with my annual seed sowings, some things did thrive, especially my roses.

I want a rose arch in my garden this year. If it can be anything as beautiful as this climbing rose I’ll be happy. I snapped this in South East London, growing down a back street near my office.

Tess, one of last year’s lovely brides bought me this gorgeous swan vase. I’m starting a collection. In it is Cosmos and Ammi Majus, both brilliant growers last year and on my sowing list for this year.

I saw this gorgeous Nigella Hispanica at RHS Wisley and have bought the seeds already to sow on this year’s cutting patch.

I plan to grow lots more Dahlias this year. This coral beauty I bought at a plant sale and don’t even know what it’s called – hopefully the tuber will survive the winter in my shed. Mixed in with Daucus Carota it looked gorgeous in a vase.

There’s not much happening on my cutting patch at the moment and I’m taking it easy with the manual labour until the weather gets a bit warmer! But today I popped down to the allotment to harvest foliage for some Christmas wreaths and I came across this beautiful little Anenome flower bravely blooming despite the cold and the frost. I planted the corms in August and wasn’t expecting to get any flowers until next year. Now this little beauty is brightening up my kitchen window sill, making me dream of spring-time!