It's been a while...

A bit like tidying up the garden shed, the longer you leave it the harder it is to just get started... And so too, I discover, with blogs.

The spring flowers have all faded and gone, leaving behind some interesting seed heads, or yellowing leaves.

The blossom has bloomed and fallen, and now there's the promise of apples, pears and plums in the autumn.

Nests have been built, and baby birds raised, and tadpoles have kept me entertained with their antics in the 'more successful than I realised' pond - there are little froglets in there now, some with both back and front legs.

Bees have been buzzing around for a couple of months now, and the Californian poppies have popped their hats and are dazzling everyone in the front garden.

There have been 'fun runs' and birthdays and, at the end of April, my aunt sent me her wedding dress - the 'something borrowed' for my mother's own wedding, on a snowy Boxing day in 1947. 

My niece, wearing her grandmother's wedding dress.

Ecletic landlady...

We have most of the usual non-paying guests - the occasional wasp, bee, moth and fly, numerous spiders, the drunken lout of a slug who leaves winding, silvery trails all over the living-room carpet every morning - and now a couple of blackbirds have set up home, tucked up in one corner of the porch, surrounded by roses. Lovely.

ps That reads as if I'm being sarcastic - I actually really do think it's lovely!! The slugs I can do without...

Classic or cliché...?

With every hedge brimming over with cow parsley I shouldn't have been too surprised to find a stalk of it in our garden, hidden behind the pear tree long enough for it to grow taller than I am. This article gives a little more information about it, including its lovely Suffolk name - Cow Mumble! I think my favourite name for it is Queen Anne's Lace, which does conjure up the delicate, white, frothy loveliness of it. It's pretty stuff, but I didn't really want it taking over the garden, so out it came (although I probably did a better job of sprinkling the seeds everywhere when I yanked it out than it could ever have managed on its own...watch this space).

Rather than put it in the garden waste bin, it ended up in a vase on the table. Hence the post title - is this a classic look or a cliché? Even the checked curtains are a little Laura Ashley circa 1973! Still, I'm happy to embrace the whole country look at the moment. We tried going a little bit edgy by painting the garden bench black to match the shed, but soon discovered there's a reason garden benches are allowed to weather gracefully and go grey - it works as a much better camouflage for all the bird poo!

It's also the time of year when walking around the garden needs a little bit more vigilance - baby birds everywhere, and almost catastrophically underfoot. I'd forgotten what tiny balls of fluff baby sparrows are, and almost invisible until you hear the mad scrabble as they disappear into the safety of the bushes! The other day a baby starling was determined to get into the studio via the (closed) garden doors, flapping and chirping, presumably at its reflection in the glass, and then spent the next ten minutes noisily demolishing the careless pyramids of plastic plant pots under the potting bench, as it hopped about trying to get a foothold. Of course, it won't be too long before we're inundated with the equivalent of teenage hoodlums at the bird table - last year we'd sometimes have more than 20 young starlings all ready to 'have a go' with any bird getting in the way of the seed. I don't think the garden bench is safe yet...