May: My garden in flower | Holidays | Drying my flowers

A busy month – so much so that I haven’t had time to write this until the first week in June! But busy in a good way, because May was filled with gardening and holidays.

As soon as the weather picked up, I was out in my garden tidying up, and planting out the pots I always seem to accumulate. The pressure is on this year because I am hoping to have a visit from a photographer in a few weeks time. I love my garden to look full and abundant, but there is the concern that other people might just find it messy!

Photographing wildflowers in Cyprus

We have just got back from a lovely family holiday in Cyprus. Here is one of my holiday photos – sea lavender and wild oats on a beach on the West coast. A hobby of mine is photographing wildflowers, so had a whale of a time there. Being the last week in May, it was starting to look a bit dry, but there was still a plethora of photogenic flora! I am dreaming of a botany trip back there in early March when things are greener. Watch out for a blog post about the flowers I spotted while I was away.

Drying flowers from my garden

Before I went on holiday, I couldn’t resist picking some bluebells, clematis montana and Mexican orange flowers from my garden to dry. I just snipped off the heads and left them in a basket in the airing cupboard for a week for the warm air to circulate round them while I was out of the house.

But my piece de resistance in terms of dried flowers is this tree peony which I picked and left to dry flat (see the plant in flower in my top photo). The flower head is 14cm across – that’s nearly 6 inches! On the subject of dried flowers – do check out my article about Modern Dried Flowers as printed in Make and Craft magazine this month.

Back home to my garden

When I got back, I was very pleased to see my aquilegias had made it to four feet tall, but rather disappointed the buttercups are almost as big! Plenty of work still to do then…

Monet’s garden and a flower show

A few weeks ago, I went for a long weekend in Paris with my friend Mercy who works for Plant Heritage. We took ourselves off to the Courson flower show. We also visited Monet’s garden – it was a glorious sunny day and the tulips and irises were out. I’ll be writing a post about that soon as well!