Welcome to ‘In A Vase On Monday’ when I am linking up with Cathy at Rambling In The Garden to join her challenge to fill a vase for the house from the garden every week.
Having come through the lean months of winter we are now on easy street! New blooms are bursting out every day on trees, shrubs and bulbs. My Cutting Garden is back in action with tulips popping in every bed. I have been giving some thought to this challenge this week and have decided that as my Cutting Garden is a slightly larger affair than is normal, it would not be any sort of a challenge for me if I just pick from there every week throughout the summer. So to make this more realistic I am going to restrict myself to using material from the main garden on a Monday. I will focus on flowers from the Cutting Garden every Sunday instead.
As I always plant a few sweet peas, annuals and dahlias in my garden beds they will still appear in posts, but I will have had to make the decision to cut material from my displays, rather than using flowers that are grown as crops. We are all reluctant to cut flowers that are part of our main borders, so this will keep the element of challenge going for me throughout the summer. It will also give me the opportunity to talk a bit about the flowering sequence in my garden.
This week did not present a challenge. The daffodils are still blooming and there are plenty of muscari flowering along the woodland walk. I think I have had more pleasure this year from my daffodils than ever before and this is primarily because I have been cutting small posies throughout the season and bringing them into the kitchen where I can enjoy their beauty and fragrance throughout the day.
In this jug I have made a spring arrangement using my later flowering varieties of narcissi and muscari. To give the arrangement height I have added a few precious stems of one of my all time favourite shrubs Exchorda x macrantha ‘The Bride’.
These beautiful ruffled petals look very much like narcissi White Cheerfulness, but they are flowering in another patch and I seem to remember that they are the very similar but slightly later flowering Bridal Crown.
Lower down the display I have used narcissi Silver Chimes, which is a very fragrant delicate looking multi headed variety. This is the last to flower in a succession of blooms establishing under the old trees in the centre of the garden. The display started with February Gold in the last week of February. All these bulbs have been planted in the last two years and I am hoping that as the years go by they will increase naturally. We leave the grass under the trees to grow long until later in the summer. This gives the bulbs ample time to die back naturally, so feeding them for next years flowers.
It is hard to capture this drift, so I have tried from an upstairs window. You can see my very small Great White Cherry in the background.
This is another view taken at ground level.
Finally a close up of Exchorda x macrantha ‘The Bride’. This is a beautiful shrub with an arching habit that I hope will produce an abundance of sprays for arrangements as it matures. It is best grown in full sun in well drained soil.
I hope you have enjoyed the flowers I have picked from my garden this week and that you will pop over to Cathy’s blog to see what she and the others have made this week.