Diamond Jubilee Weekend

Saturday 2^nd June 2012

Today the Village showed off 10 Open Gardens and the scarecrow trail is underway!  Having a Village event like this is an excellent way to meet new people!  We aimed for the gardens of friends first and then branched out to some of the others, meeting the same people in different gardens! The gardens were lovely although some said this was the wrong time of year – very in-between with the Spring flowers finished and the Summer flowers not yet in full bloom.  But that didn’t stop people looking at the unusual, the well-known, the vege gardens, the orchards, the neat formal rose gardens and the nicely cut lawns! No pics I’m afraid (the English are a private lot and don’t like people taking photos of them or their things!) so that’s why I’ve included some pics of what’s come up in our garden!

I love poppies; their hairy stems and bowed buds! And this Apricot colour is lovely!

Foxgloves

Irises in the pond

Strawberries?

We have left our garden pretty much as it was when we moved here just eight months ago, to see what is going to come up each season – it’s a nice excuse anyway! We’ve had some lovely surprises! To my delight I’ve found red field poppies popping up, but unfortunately their delicate petals just don’t last long in the wind.  The dainty white, purple and pink ‘weeds’ (I think!) taking over huge tracts of garden space are so pretty. Someone said that weeds are all the plants you just don’t want in your garden! Blue irises growing in the pond (now devoid of fish probably due to a heron or cormorant’s hunger pangs) and lots of greenery of various shades make up a country garden look, for a while, until it starts to look untidy and frazzled at the edges!

Miniature rose in the front garden

Another kind of poppy! Nice & bright.

The humble buttercup!

A pink 'weed'?!

It was getting a little nippy by the 5pm closing time as we left our neighbours little garden but we met a couple we’d seen at other gardens obviously looking for our neighbours Open Garden sign. As we already knew they’d shut shop for the day and were preparing to traipse around hunting scarecrows, we invited 'new friends' in to ours for a cup of tea instead!  That’s how to meet new people!

An interestingly shaped pink flower!

A variety of Lavender!

One thing I now know I do want in my garden – Carnations. I used to grow Carnations in my Cape Town garden but discovered they were not easy to grow in KwaZulu Natal, so to find them growing in English gardens – no greenhouse necessary – is good. Now to find someone who’ll give me a cutting, and to decide where to put them!

As for the scarecrows (sorry, again no photos), there was a chimney sweep scarecrow at the chimney sweep’s house, a “Hamish Willie-uhhms” complete with bagpipes at the Scottish lady’s house, a traditional potato farmer at the potato farmer's house, and I believe the winning scarecrow was “Liz and her Corgies!” which we might get round to seeing tomorrow. And of course an assortment of others at gates and on street corners!