Celia Hart's blog about what's going on in and around her studio.
Art, printmaking, inspirations, gardening, vegetables, hens, landscapes, wild flowers, East Anglia, adventure, travel.

Thursday 7 June 2007

Strawberries + roses = summer


These are not just strawberries - they are freshly picked strawberries from my own garden; long pointy Gariguette with a sharp clean flavour and round, plump, sweet Cambridge Favourite.


The roses are magnificent this year - huge, luscious, lip-stick coloured, heavily scented roses. The oriental poppies are equally vivid, their colours made more dramatic by the black velvet centres. Big blowsey flowers seem to back in fashion - I love the clashing loudness of the intense pinks and reds.


And high above the roses the Purple Podded Peas are flowering - beautiful two-tone purple butterfly-like flowers. As pretty as sweet-peas but with the added bonus of edible purple pods to follow.

4 comments:

  1. I love the poppies the most!
    Oh, it must be good to eat your own strawberries! I have been a coward about growing them so far! I stop by them in the garden centre and wistfully imagine growing them, then I tell myself, you don't know how and they could be tricky and so I move on!

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  2. Lovely photo's. Nothing tastes quite the same as strawberries picked from your own garden. I only have four ready at the moment, unfortunately not a dishfull like you, perhaps I could come over and borrow a few!!

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  3. Delightful strawberries! I had some in my garden too and I enjoyed them recently with shortcakes.

    I've never heard of purple-podded peas. Where did you find the seeds?

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  4. Hi and thanks for visiting.
    Strawberries are not that difficult to grow so do give them a try.

    Thanks for the shortcake recipe Christa - I'll try that this weekend.

    The Purple Podded Peas are a very old English variety sadly no longer available commercially due to the prohibitably expensive European legislation (don't get me started!!!!!!!) The Heritage Seed Library makes such vegetable seeds available for interested gardeners to grow and share. See link on the blog. I used to grow the Purple Podded Peas when I got my first garden, a local seed firm sold them at the time, but after a few house moves my own supply of saved seeds has run out. A fellow HSL member came to my rescue and sent me some of his saved seed.
    The catalogue is a wonderful read - each veg variety has a story to tell.

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