The garden at Midsummer

I wandered round my garden today, two days before midsummer. It's so lush and green - fecund; now there's a word that sums up Mother Earth at this time of year

making mobiles

I raided my shell collection to make a mobile to hang from the rose bush in the garden.

gardening

I've been spending a lot of time gardening since the weather turned nice - planted lots of veggies in our small patch. We lost about 40 small salad leaf plants to slugs - same as last year - so may not plant them again. They seemed to prefer to be grown in the containers rather than in the ground so maybe that's the trick.

Had to stop and sit in the sunshine and sketch my tools though...

Winter Fungus

Growing on the side of one of my wooden barrel planters. We've had so much rain this year the whole character of my garden seems to be changing.

Beech Tree

The beech tree in our garden in its full flush of autumn beauty. After the huge storm we had in 1987, while we were clearing and logging all the fallen pine trees in the garden, we found a tiny beech shoot just by the side of the log pile we were making. We were very careful not to disturb it or cover it with logs and this is what we got for our care.

Actually, I think this is out of focus - that or my glasses are dirty :-)

Squirrel Leftovers

Everything in my garden gets covered in pine cone leftovers after the squirrels have nibbled them. This is an old wooden table which lives right under one of the pine trees.

roses

This is one of my favourite roses in the garden. It has the most amazing scent and grows in a pot near my back door. This year it's grown one long stalk to a huge height which makes it difficult to support and it's very vulnerable. I don't think it's going to survive my husband's hedge cutting exercise this weekend!

I held back from posting this until today - the rose did survive!!

beautiful lichen

Pretty lichen on my garden seat. Much too nice to remove!

first flowers

I took my camera into the garden this afternoon

             

Look who came visiting while I was photographing the foxglove!

the name escapes me!

I know what this flower is because I have lots in the garden - they seed themselves everywhere. I have these pink ones and some blue ones but I can't for the life of me remember what they're called. I'm sure it will come to me eventually so I won't agonize over it!

chives

How wonderful it is to be able to go outside with my camera with no fear of it getting drenched in the rain. I wandered round the garden in the sunshine and found lots of new growth to photograph. These chives are so delicate, balancing at the top of their sinuous stems.

Lawn Roller

This hasn't been used for a while and has been abandoned behind the bonfire site at the bottom of our garden. It's as heavy as it looks!

JAPONICA FLOWER

This is the flower of a large plant I have in my garden which I believe is some sort of a Japonica. The flower is huge and in all the years I've had it I've only seen it flower a couple of times. This time I had my camera ready!

SPRING WEATHER

We're having the most beautiful spring weather here in the south of England - more like summer really. The grass in my garden is growing fast and looking lush and hopeful - later on in the summer it will begin to dry out as the pine trees drink all the moisture but for now it's looking just lovely.

FIRST COLOURS OF SPRING

My camellia is always the first plant to flower in my garden each year. I love its exuberant pinkness. It's a little spotty this year though and I'm not sure why. Both the petals and the leaves are blotchy.

SPIKY!

This is another of the early flowering plants in my garden. I don't know what it's called but the leaves are very, very spiky. It's a little invasive and not easy to get rid of, but I don't mind that as it's in the dogs' part of the garden so it doesn't matter much. In the autumn it has the most amazing purple coloured berries with a pretty white bloom on them.

BOTTLE BORDER

I bordered one of my flower beds with upturned wine bottles sunk into the soil. It's very effective, especially when the sun sparkles on the water that collects in the rounded bottoms. But it took forever to do and we had to drink a hell of a lot of wine! Unfortunately one or two have broken and are difficult to replace as they're stuck in pretty well by now and broken glass is difficult to grip.

Autumn Rose

There's something about these lovely autumn roses that invokes a nostalgia for the summer that's just gone. This one is so beautiful and so delicate that I just had to capture it before its petals start to fall. I'll try to photograph it through the phases of its decline if the wind doesn't cause that to happen too quickly.

I set up the shot using aperture priority using a large aperture to blur the background but the shutter didn't seem to be able to set itself automatically - it was continually overexposing. So I set it to full manual and this worked fine. I wonder why that is.

But I've decided to upgrade my camera to a Canon EOS 550D because I'm so enjoying photographing again I thought I'd get a really nice, versatile camera while I can. The huge choice of lenses definitely influenced my decision plus the fact that I had an EOS 300 some years ago and just loved it although I'm hoping this new one will be a little lighter. I think I have to make a compromise between versatility and weight.

Salad Days

This is a bowlful of my last remaining salad leaves from the garden. We've been eating home-grown salad for about three months now and there is something deeply satisfying about walking outside with a salad bowl and picking the leaves straight into it. We're totally organic so don't have to wash the leaves - just straight from garden to mouth!

I still have tomatoes growing - they've been much better this year as it's been such a dry year. I don't have a greenhouse so they have to be outside and in past years they've got so wet that they've begun rotting on the vine before ripening and I've had to rush out and rescue them in their under-ripe state. Great for green tomato chutney but no good in a salad. There are some plants (the ones with the bigger variety of fruit) that don't seem to be getting past the green stage still, so there may well be a chutney making session looming.

The leaves in the bowl include 'Cocarde', 'Lollo Biondi' and 'Red Salad Bowl'. There is also some wild Rocket in there and I'm still picking this despite the fact that it's flowered.