Sharing the joy

Durer has a lot to answer for , and maybe Archinboldo, as have always been drawn to the visual representation of things I love, and the way the natural world can be represented in ways which make you happy , thoughtful or downright sad . 

I was telling grandson  soon to go hopefully to live in London, that he must go to the  SAATCHI. Beloved and I have been many times in our travelling around days. We have seen some exhibitions which just blew our minds , with the assault they presented, making us react , with the colours some presented , with the draughtmanship some presented ,with the sheer audacity some presented (like a tank of oil). We are a nation of folk who may have opinions, and able to share them unless they are liable to scrutiny by the thought police or the real police. 

This  symphony in green is my Durer.

We don’t travel any more , the trip to Reighton nursery is the furtherest these days.

Imagine then the joy of seeing exhibitions which are right on our doorstep literally. 

I have been nurturing a plant I dug up on the plot.Its doing very well and is now over half a metre high. I have been trying to remember what I planted in the Spot.Its not an Echinacea or a Chicory, or what I have been trying to grow for 15 years , the perennial vegetable called Good King Henry. I have bought a packet of seeds every year and faithfully planted them.I particularly like its Latin name ‘Chenopodium bonus-henricus, an edible Goosefoot like spinach , cut and come again for ever. Just what I need for greens . It has dawned on me that my years of hopeful waiting have not come to fruition yet again. I have been nurturing a Rosebay Willow Herb, a beautiful ‘weed’, which colours the August roadsides and waste ground with its purple flower spikes.When the flowers go to seed  the air is full of the down like seeds wind blown and able to travel for miles on the breeze. I will be keeping it, its is lovely to see close up, and will just have to compete with all the other hopeful erratics in this corner of the old town, including a beautiful Sow  Thistle round the corner.

15 years ago my Echium collection was just beginning. Folk knocked on our door to ask the name of the towering spiked inflorescences appearing above 8foot wall. Seedlings always followed by the hundreds and easily removed as recognized immediately by the spotted first true  leaves. Now even former critics like them as they are indeed Ace Pollinators and flower for months and months until the Spike is finished. (They are biennials or triennials and tender)

In this little corner of town there is now lots of joy to share. In our street alone people are growing pots of flowers outside their houses.We have no front gardens or even gardens at all in our case, just a small back yard. I love the accidental garden outside the flats around the corner from here where the cracks in the flags are supporting self sown flowers from last years pots, and a lovely ‘meadow ‘ of cornflowers has grown rapidly as the warm weather has brought them on.