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.

Friday 22 May 2009

This month's colours are . . .

Crimson, Magenta and Lots of Green

I've briefly watched some of the TV highlights of this year's Chelsea Flower Show and from what I gathered, the "in" colours are deep reds, purple and lots of green. Well surprise, surprise! green is pretty dominant in my garden this month too and there are splashes of magenta, red and pink as well :-)

These are my favourites . . .

Geranium psilostemon • Paeony
Allium 'Globemaster' • Thalictrum aquilegifolium


And there's lots of gorgeous green – I think last year's wet summer must have set the plants up for an explosion of growth this spring. I love the lime green Cornelian Cherry against the deep burgundy Prunus in the background. I could say I designed it that way – but it just sort of happened.


In the courtyard the 'fountain that I condemned when I first laid eyes on it but is still here' is now dwarfed by my lovely humble umbels – angelica, lovage and sweet cicely – three of my favourite herbs. They disappear in the winter leaving the ivy false-topiary spheres and the fountain (mmmm – it's going one of these days); then in spring they erupt into growth, a green fountain :-)


This is the view from the back of my studio. I've not had time to preen and manicure and have left the hens to scratch and make dust baths where they will. Don't look too closely – you'll spot the nettles, ground elder and the grass dying because just under the soil is a ring of concrete. Yes, I thought it was something far more exciting, like the remains of a Tudor dovecot, but sadly not.

So, before this hummocky symphony of foliage becomes a cacophony in a month or so; stand back and admire . . .

. . . and follow the hen for the next instalment

7 comments:

  1. wow!! how many of the under-gardeners have you lost in your jungle? :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Beautiful, just love the lush greeness of it all. I am not big on overly tidied gardens and everything in soldierly rows either. I'd be very happy to join the under-gardeners and scratch around here too!

    ReplyDelete
  3. How lovely - you have some of my favourite plants there - lovage makes a wonderful summer screen for our small patio. And I've just picked a bunch of flowers in the Chelsea colours for my in-laws. It includes the wonderfully frothy thalictrum - meadow rue - in your first group of photos.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The view from your studio is wonderful. From mine I can see a brick wall on one side and an overgrown choiysia on the other side!

    ReplyDelete
  5. What a lovely garden!

    ReplyDelete
  6. such a lovely garden and I adore that view from your studio.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Looks beautiful, very much what I aspire to at Bag End but I know it will be quite a few years before things look as good as yours.

    ReplyDelete

I love reading all the comments (except for spam and advertising which I will delete) and I'll reply here in the comments under each blog post, it may take a few days if I'm busy.
You don't need to have a blog to leave a comment, you can select the name/URL option and fill in just your name instead of a blog link.