Favourite containers

By now, you all know my fetish for old china teacups, but it's hard to pin down one favourite container for flowers.  In this post, I'm inviting you to post pictures of your own alternatives to the glass vase - so come and join in the fun….

I'm just experimenting with setting up a blog on my Tuckshop Flowers website, so this is where you'll find the post.  Bear with me as I work all the tech-y bits out!

Click here: Blog - Tuckshop Flowers

A* for the gardening life

Aquilegias, anemone, alliums and alchemilla. (A*, A*, A*, A* )

Stirchley Community Market was fun in the sun on Tuesday night and it was a real joy to stand in the Working Men's Club car park with the sun on my face, a load of lovely flowers for sale and a piece of locally home-made banana cake in my hand.  The cold pints from the bar drifting sociably past also looked very appealing....  A really great atmosphere with lots of gardening and plant chat to be had with passing folks - some of whom even knew the Tuckshop from their childhood sweetie-buying days. (It's a bit of a local landmark).

At the end of the market, I felt rather like lady bountiful, doling out leftover posies to my fellow stall holders and the reaction this gets is always one of delight. I am always happy to rehome any larger bunches in my own house and enjoy combining them into superbunches to fill my flared glass vase above (which one lady was coveting at the market - NOT for sale, it's too fantastic!).

Whereas at the end of the teaching day I'd come home with a pile of marking and preparation, my current life sends me back with flowers which I have grown and love. Guess which I like best. When the sun is shining, this new life cannot be beaten. Best job in the world!

Recycle your jam jars, Christmas is coming.

Mini jam jars - the kind you get in hotels for your one-person breakfast, are great for individual place setting arrangements or for putting candles in and arranging for the Christmas table.  Make little posies if you can salvage a few hardy blooms from your garden, and arrange them down the centre of the table or in a circle, interspersed with candles.

Hydrangeas: NOT just for grannies!

Say hydrangea and most people envisage scraggy bushes in unloved suburban front gardens.  There are plenty of them around and I always used to dismiss them as granniated flowers.  But that was before I discovered them as cut flowers.  Fantastic from summer to winter, they keep on producing dense heads which change colour throughout the season.  Just look at the ones below - from the same bush, but the paler one, growing in the shady centre and the pinker one growing in a more exposed part.

 They also make an excellent structural framework for short arrangements like this one (in a jam jar) and hold other, less sturdy flowers in position.  I'm converted.

When the weather gets colder, the flowers will darken to a deep red outer ring, with a greenish centre and look stunning in autumn arrangements.


Even the crispy heads look good in their own right when they give up the ghost after the frosts arrive.  These beauties will hold (but eventually lose their pinkish colour) all through the winter 'til you chop them off to welcome the new buds in the following spring.

Have I managed to convince you yet????

Coming up roses...

Lovely scents in the garden at the moment - sweet peas are starting and the roses are coming into flower.  Can't resist cutting them for the house and love them mixed in with the frothy lime green of alchemilla mollis.

 It's also the only time of year when I have even a small corner in my heart for ground elder.... If it wasn't such a thug, it would actually be quite a good plant as it has lovely bright foliage and stems and gorgeous airy white flowers.  The fact that I have hack them off before it can spread seed anywhere else means that I have lots to stuff into my flower arrangements - it is very pretty though. Pity I hate it for its invasiveness...

A mixed bunch of roses, knautia, alchemilla mollis, ground elder and pink and white snapdragons.  A few sprigs of pittosporum are great with their variegated leaves and dark stems for contrast.

Wish I could add smellivision too.... Gorgeously scented.

Bursting buds!

I love this time of year - you go away for a week and come back to find your garden is 50% fuller than when you left. Boinging is occurring. The recent damp weather has done everything the power of good AND the water butts are all full again.

Since I went away, more tulips have come into bud, the pear tree has started to blossom (that was nearly 'plossom' - I quite like that typo), the guelder roses and actual roses are busting with new leaves and the clematis on the garage is hanging with fat nuggets waiting to open.  More fool the ones that do because I was reading a flower arranging book the other day which said that clematis make surprisingly good cut flowers.  Any flowers that were open this morning have been snipped and put into my latest bunch.

The greenhouse has had yet another reshuffle as more things that have germinated in indoor warmth are booted out to toughen up.  I just hope this -4 degrees which I heard rumoured in a recent weather forecast for the Midlands just doesn't materialise.  That's the only problem with early spring seed-sowing enthusiasm and an unheated greenhouse.  Still, the seedlings and plantlets in there at present are looking happy enough, if growing a little more slowly in the current shifting temperatures.

I'm getting very impatient with my most recent batch of dahlia tubers though - they are showing no eagerness to sprout nearly three weeks after being introduced to compost...  I'm going to start shouting at them soon to see if that works!

First bunch of the year

Big fat buds are appearing on the pear tree and I've had to clean out the cold frames to house the greenhouse overflow.  It must, therefore, be spring.

I've even managed to pick enough stuff for a vase of flowers, so hopefully it is the start of a prolific year of flowery marvellousness.

Must prune more of the red-stemmed dogwood used in the arrangement above, so it comes back with more bright red growth late in the year.  Love the lime green of its leaves at the moment. Very eye pokey!  Have planted lots more honesty seeds (the purple stuff) in the garden this week, so should get lots more to pick over the next few months - got quite a surprise to see that flowering this early - must be a self-sown seedling that has overwintered in the hedge bottom.  Also sowed pot marigolds, nigella and cerinthe so I should get a few vasefuls from that investment of five minutes labour.  I love this pink hellebore flower - a seedling from one of my mother-in-law's plants years ago, which is now firmly established in my own garden.

Nearly pruned the straggly bit off the amelanchier tonight, but had the bright idea of holding off for another few days.  If I trim it back when its blossom buds are a bit further on, I can enjoy it in the house rather than just putting it straight into the shredding pile.

This good weather has brought on a ruthless purge on all things which are not earning their keep in the flower border, or which need dividing to promote new vigourous growth.  Leggy lavenders have gone, sambucus nigra is about a third of the size it was this morning, things have a bit of breathing space around them, and plant labels marking out seed beds are now starting to appear in all the borders.

 A friend went home with a tray full of various hardy geraniums, lysimachia, knapweed and knautia as she's just in the process of digging out a new flower border and needs some inhabitants for the bare soil.  Just hope I haven't passed her any bits of ground elder with it.  I DID inspect all the rootballs carefully to see if there were any nuggets of the evil weed lurking within.  I see that stuff when I close my eyes at night at the moment!