Cats in the Kitchen, Flora in the Garden

I would just like to say thank you to all of you out there who have so far left comments on my blog, when I started it I did wonder if anyone would ever bother with it and have been pleasantly surprised. It is lovely when I check my blog before making a new post to see comments for my previous post, I just love exchanging ideas and writing about my life with people out there. Keep commenting you lovely people.xx

The man in the battered old photograph to the right is my great grandfather, Alfred. I never knew him, he died long before I was born but he was a great gardener, he was head of a team of a public park's gardeners but turned down the job of actual park-keeper as he would no longer be able to be 'hands on' with the earth and plants. He taught his son-in-law who was my grandfather, all that he knew about plants and vegetables and I can remember as a little girl helping my grandfather in his garden. I think that is where my love of gardening has come from, although due to where we lived I have had to wait until a few years ago for a garden of my own. I often think of my great grandfather, Alfred, when I garden and whimsically think that he keeps me right in how to grow my plants, and they do certainly grow. The strange thing is that one of my obsessions are tulips and my mother tells me they were his obsession too.




Well that is the end of the Chelsea Flower Show for this year, I love watching Chelsea, although some of the more modern gardens are not to my taste. I loved the Wormcast garden, and the Daily Telegraph garden and the photo of the garden above is certainly a talking point. I loved the planting of it with all its herbs and the green lady lying in the middle. You can check all these gardens out on the BBC.co.uk/gardening website. I like my gardens crammed full of flowers and herbs and love old fashioned cottage type flowers, and lovely fragances you can enjoy when you sit out in the evening. There is always something I would love at Chelsea and this year I was really taken with the North American Pacific Irises from Broadleigh Nursery, they have wonderful colours and some are almost orchid like and they have a longer flowering season, I believe, than ours, in fact I have sent off for a catalogue of them. Catalogues! well there is another subject for a posting I am a catalogue fanatic and am always requesting them. My husband laughs every morning and says 'any catalogues for you today?', but they are such good sources of inspiration aren't they?