Take me outside

sit in the green garden

and The Mother Hen and I did just that.

Is there anything better than an open garden? The promise of tea and cake, a plant stall, and a snoop around somebody else's garden. It is a truly wonderful thing. The oooo's and aaaaah's at floral splendour and perhaps the chance to see what wallpaper they have in their drawing room.

Like true English roses, we wandered the gardens and sat and took tea and cake outside on the windswept terrace. Chatting with others and saying how nice it was to be outside, whilst secretly wishing we had worn more layers.

Then on to the Herb Nursery, where i encouraged Mama to buy all the varieties of hellebores ever, and herbage, so that i can snip at them next year. If you are in the vicinity, a visit to the herb nursery is a must. It is a delight. Lovely people, and plants.

This weekend there is a bank holiday and it is Hambleton Open Gardens. They had me at the word Tombola.

Lately

Still having a dalliance with yellow, to the delight of most but the chagrin of others.

and lily of the valley which delights everybody. Ever.

How can such a little flower be so captivating? Is it nostalgia? A reminder of our grandmothers?

and we need a new blog header, i for one am sick of the sight of this one, do you have a preference for the next? Something softer, if i'm going to have to stand on a chair again, might as well get it right.

for people who like the weddings, did you see this in The Telegraph? Constance dipping flowers in whitewash, she was the Bornay of her day.

and i can't stop watching this, one because i want one, but also just because i love a behind the scenes video and Diane Kruger's hair.

oh, my life is changing everyday

in every possible way

Filling hexagonal vases at the weekend, reminded me of chemistry lectures at university.

I loved chemical equations.

Life changes, do you ever think what if i had stayed in science/ taken that job with Ferrari/ married him?

Not in a maudlin way, just in a sliding doors sort of way.

Also The Cranberries

thinking about thinking of you

summertime think it was June.

furniture is being jiggled.

windows cleaned

There is natural light

and the heater has been resigned to the storage, so if the temperature plummets tomorrow it will be my fault.

also does anybody use Blogstomp? I have the trial and seems good for the resizing of images for blog and website. Is it good?

Blogger is having a fit mixing up all the images and its driving me crazy. Also the answer to this is not Wordpress.

and so many people have asked me what was Mrs Thatcher's funeral tribute. From the images I would say, Duchess de Nemours peonies, avalanche? rose sweet peas, phlox, and white forget-me-not.

I don't know who did them. Do you?

Also Dakota

Goldilocks and the three yellow roses

An ill fated quest to find the "perfect" yellow rose.

Ill fated because the "perfect" anything doesn't exist in the flora world. Perfect for that moment exists, and then you order the same flower in the following week and it has decided it might develop a deeper colour that week, just because it fancied being a bit different, a bit like me always wanting to dye my hair auburn.

So instead you have to make the perfect palette using a plethora of shades and tones and shapes. You don't have to do that, you could just bang out rose domes of all the same thing and it would take a third of the time, and you would probably make 3 times as much money.

My brain wants to put ALL the shades in.

I'm trying 3 out today.

Top Design - one of those roses is actually perfect, but there are 39 others that aren't. Annoying.
Caramel Antique - can do no wrong in my book, but only looks yellow if petalled, by the time it opens it has faded to champagne.
Shine - what sort of a name is that for a rose?, a spray, as yellow as they come, no tone just absolute yellow.

Mixing them all together is more pleasing but i think you need at least 3 other shades in there to make it work, and in different light they all look peach.

Yellow roses are a lot like men.

The search continues.

on plain walls and new tables

This is my kitchen, a familiar space to regular readers. It has very good light for photographs.

Taupe/ stone/ whatever walls

and pattern added in linen, vases, flowers and such.

I am trying to do the same to the shop, summer is coming and with it busier flowers. In Spring things are more uniform, things are short, tulips, hyacinth, rankels and sit nicely in old enamel buckets minding their own business.

Summer flowers are less well behaved always getting tangled up with each other if not spaced correctly and taller, any excuse for new vases.....

I have acquired some new tables and some nice men to help me jiggle it all about.

Do you shuffle your interiors around with the seasons, or is it just me?

and I found out how to link to the instagram. Voila.

I'm loving it, and have found so many brilliant inspiring people.

Instant gardening

For those of us who were too busy drinking gin or painting pumpkins to do the whole autumn sowing thing.

nip to the shop, i have them all ready to sink into the ground and provide instant colour.

The promise of a fine weekend with temperatures up to 18 degrees has the entire town giddy with excitement. Come Monday the newspapers will be full of pictures of people laying on the lawns at Kensington Gardens in bikinis, with the headline

"scorchio!"

and we will all complain that it is TOO warm

and burn our shoulders.

and say things like "a bit of rain would be good"

There is also a grand prix happening, on the BBC so I can actually watch it. They showed FP2 this morning, and HAM was quick, and for a split second I forgot about the whole Mercedes thing and that I should have actually been looking mid grid for PER.

Happy weekending.

Love you long time

Many years ago, when i was young, I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, selling things to GP's. You weren't literally selling things, it was a concept sell. Inform the GP of your wonder drug, and hope that when they next came to prescribe, they would choose it over the chap's in the Vauxhall Vectra parked next to yours in the surgery car park. This was in the days long before PCT formularies and for the sake of this discussion we are going to pretend dispensing GP's don't exist.

We had all manner of sales charts with clinical data and the main objective was to find the hook for that particular GP and fold the chart to the relevant page, sell, and leave some post it notes or pens. There was obviously a lot more to it, and to this day my clinical knowledge of Proton Pump Inhibitors is top notch.

Yesterday somebody tried to sell me their particular flowers, and based their entire sales speech on the fact that they last a long time. Longevity is king apparently to the flower retailers of England. Just not to me, i think its lovely that they last over 2 weeks, but the colours were awfully crass, and so even if they lasted 6 months, they are never going to be of interest.

The salesman failed to see my point of view, and I his. Exasperation on both sides. No sale made.

In my book, in the argument of aesthetic over longevity, always choose aesthetic.

Longevity is why plants were created.

and in reply to a comment from yesterday and a question numerous times asked in the shop, it is I that takes all the pictures featured here, unless otherwise stated.


also Black eyed peas

Lately and in no particular order

Sort of almost? perhaps?, maybe? feels like Spring?

There has been sunshine, there has been activity au jardin, but also this morning a frost.

nice.

and i have joined the Instagram, i have no idea how to link to it, but the username to follow is @misspickering

I know what you are thinking,"you barely have a grasp on your recent technological acquisitions without throwing an iphone and ANOTHER social media app into the mix too"

I promise not to tweet the links with 50 hashtags, Facebook the images, and then blog them too, because I know that is super annoying. I was going to make a joke and hashtag iphoneonly nofilter FLOWERS but i don't know where the hashtag key is on my new Mac.

Such fun.