Welcome to the my first Monday vase of June!! As usual on a Monday I am linking up with the lovely Cathy at Rambling In The Garden to join in with her challenge to find something from the garden to put in a vase for the house every week of the year.
I have loved May for all the beauty in the countryside - lanes billowing with cow parsley and hedgerows laced with hawthorn blossom. In May the garden almost plays second fiddle to the beauty I find outside my gates, but in June the garden takes centre stage. Peonies, roses and foxgloves fill my borders and the Cutting Garden sees the first of my favourite hardy annuals. Today I took my snips to the Cutting Garden in the lovely early evening light and found the first of the peonies popping open in the warm sunshine of the last couple of days. Only a few are ready so I could not be picky about colour, but there were enough to fill a jug with the addition of a few nigella blooms and a handful of sweet peas.
Below you can see my first bloom of peony Coral Sunset. In the early spring I planted 3 Coral Charm and 3 Coral Sunset peonies not expecting any flowers this year. Two of the Coral Sunset peonies have produced one bloom each and I am so excited to see how these peonies perform in future years! The colour and form of this peony is stunning - I just want more of them so that I can fill a whole jug with just this sumptuous colour.
This is the first bloom of the Sarah Bernhardt peonies and there will be plenty more to come. Sarah Bernhardt is probably my favourite peony - large double flowers of palest pink that are beautifully scented and last well in a vase.
The sweet pea I have used today is from my greenhouse batch - the outdoor sweet peas are slow to get going this year - probably because of the cold night time temperatures. This sweet pea is from the Spring Sunshine range sold by Owls Acre Seeds - the colour is Champagne. This is new to me this year and will certainly be a permanent feature on my list in years to come. The colour is deceptive - it looks decided apricot on its own but appears more a delicate pink when put with pink flowers - a very amiable flower!
The blue nigella is from a self seeded batch that have been growing slowly through the winter. Nigella is just such a versatile flowers - I use it in arrangements as a bud, in flower and as a seed head and it looks stunning every way.
Finally for today I had to share this photo I took of Ruby. She was very interested in what I was doing with the flowers, but not so interested that she could bring herself to get up!
Things are hotting up now with the wedding I am preparing for in July, so with six weeks to go I have decided to introduce a weekly Wedding Wednesday post to encourage myself to practice my arrangements in preparation for a very busy few days of cutting and arranging on the week of the wedding. This weekend I was fortunate to arrange the flowers for a lovely friend's 60th birthday celebrations and I will share these flowers with you on Wednesday. The party needed 6 bowls of flowers for the tables, which was great practice for the wedding where I will be making a mixture of flower bowls and oasis wreaths to surround hurricane lamps for the reception tables.
Also this week I am attending another inspirational day with Kim Beedie of Figa & Co at Glenham Hall, so I will be sharing the photos over the weekend. This time Kim is concentrating on roses and if anyone remembers my post about the Glemham Hall Garden in Winter you will know that I am very excited about seeing how that amazing rose garden will look this week!
I am looking forward to being back here on Wednesday and in the meantime please do pop over to Cathy's blog to see what she and the others have made this week.