Saturday 23 July 2011

A day out, visiting an NGS garden

Last Sunday week, we visited a village near Alvechurch which opened a number of gardens on the NGS, National Gardens Scheme. Volunteers open their gardens to the public for a day and donate money raised to charity. Our visit just happened to coincide with this years summer here in the sunny UK.
We were pleased to see a heron on a short walk down the near-by canal whilst waiting for the official opening time.
here's a very much blown-up shot, in case you didn't believe me. Unfortunately I do not have an optical zoom on my cheapo camera, this is the sort of time when I wish I had not been so tight.

This is me on the canal bridge, showing the crowds gathering in the village. And of course every English village has a pub!


One very large garden had a stream running thru it and a path alongside the stream. The above photos show the path both ways from where I was standing.

This was a lawn which was very much to my liking, the garden was on a hillside and shaded all round by mature trees. It was such a quiet spot, even in this village miles from anywhere. Even the visitors did not find it whilst I was there. I loved it.

There were many other gardens but most were quite small, in keeping with the size of the cottages. they were well designed and well planted but I had been spoiled by our previous visit to pump cottage and so did not take many photos on this visit. That is not to say it was not an enjoyable day out, six gardens - all very different - made it a very interesting experience but........

Sunday 17 July 2011

My Garden in Flower

One of the things I love doing is to photograph the flowers in my garden. Not so much because I love flowers, although they do make gardening worthwhile, but because of the memories of happy and peaceful sunny (?) days at home that they represent to me. So here are a few photographs taken ths year between April and June.
 Lilac
 Pieris ( flame bush)
Viola
 Japanese Maple
 Peony
Digitalis (Foxglove)

Is there any more to say? Some of the images above are obviously not flowers but leaves, however I love colour however it arrives. I nearly didn't include the last shot, the foxglove, because it is in very poor focus but I do love these flowers. Such stately blooms and this year for some reason I have had one white flowering plant instead of the purple which I usually get. I have never planted any of these but they obviously self-seed and I always leave one or two to come to fruition for the display and to make sure that I get more the following year.

In fact, I am forever pulling up seedlings of trees and shrubs which have presumably been deposited by the birds which we have in profusion in the garden. We are not far from the countryside, being on the edge of a very rural setting and see lots of animals as well as the birds birds. Bats, moles, foxes, frogs are all to be seen in our garden. I keep a small pool which has become home to the frogs and have a pile of grass and leaves behind one shrubbery which I think was built by hedgehogs, although we havae not seen them this year yet. Our garden has lots of flowers but it could well be called a wild garden. Perhaps a few shots would clarify this description, maybe the next post?