Today was my umpteenth birthday and I received a surprise prezzie from our garden: a mystery flower hath bloomed. We thought earlier that it might be a camellia, but I’m not convinced that the leaves would agree.

Click the pic to see its leafy qualities up close and botanical. Any identification suggestions welcome. Meanwhile, all join [...]

Look what’s growing in our side border! Pretty, isn’t it? It’s Silene armeria, or catchfly, so called because it has sticky stems that catch any small flying insect that dares to visit the plant without pollenating it.

Cornflower, known to country folk as batchelor’s buttons (or Centaurea cyanus if you’re trying to be a Latin-spouting clever [...]

A couple of weeks ago, we planted about 200 assorted bulbs in our back border around the pyracantha bushes. As with all gardening projects, we don’t like to get our hopes up too much. If they grow, they grow, we said. If not, well, at least they weren’t too expensive. It’s all a bit of [...]

Our weed patch/wannabe wildflower meadow now has at least two ‘proper’ plants growing in it: cornflower (which, admittedly, is described as an arable weed in some books), and a couple of beautiful deep-orange Siberian wallflowers. Both of the above were listed on the pack of two million seeds that we scattered last autumn, so we [...]