Take a stroll around the garden…

Once again, I have little to show you in the crafty department, but my roses are well and truly putting on a show so I thought I might show them off a little.

When we built our house, we had the front of the house block landscaped professionally (which was SUCH a good idea, we would still be trying to finish it if it were left to us).  My husband very cleverly advises people to include the landscaping if possible when budgeting for a house, which we did and I’ve never regretted it.  The back was our own design, and it grew over a period of a couple of years.  One thing we did agree on was NO ROSES.

We end up arguing about rose bushes, you see.  My husband is slightly trigger happy when it comes to pruning, and in our last house all three bushes died a horrible death because I felt he could just not Leave. The. Darn. Rose. Bushes. Alone.  He believed it was other causes that contributed to their death, I believe it was down to him.  We argued much.

As you can see though, there are many roses in our garden now.  We agreed, sensibly I think, that if we got rose bushes, we would get professional help in learning how to prune them.  Which is what ended up happening, and now some of our rose bushes are six foot tall.  I love, love, love them.  I believe he finally knows how to prune them (and no, I was not invited to do them myself, which is what I would have liked.  The outside is well and truly his domain).

It is the height of summer, however and as soon as one luscious little rosebud pops its head out, the sun quickly fries all the petals.  You’ve got to be quick to get a bunch that haven’t been cooked.

But as a whole from a distance, they do look scrumptious.  I love home grown roses.  Overblown, messy, every rose a different colour – I love that. 

 

 

We are about to undertake an arty quilt class in the next few months and I’ve been trying to find photos/ideas to use as my main theme.  The photo above worked really well, and that might be where I start.  Perhaps.

We do have other flowers in our garden.  I think this may be a native, but very probably wrong in that (gardening is not my speciality).  We have a few in our garden and they grow like weeds!

Can I tell you a secret?  Really, strongly, avidly dislike agapanthus.  Strongly.  Don’t know why I took a photo of it. 

Can I tell you another story?  We had three lovely, beautiful English lavender bushes.  Had is the important word there.  Despite my pleas – he pruned them.  They all died.  This is a struggling, very small little English lavender I made him go out and buy me.  He’s promised never to touch the lavender again. 

And just to show you it’s not all sweetness and light in my garden, we found this rather terrifying thing.  His body alone was over an inch long, without adding the legs!

Whilst it’s true that many of our spiders are poisonous, including the red back of course, I’ve heard that most of the garden ones are just normal, household variety, non poisonous.  We left this one there, his web was most impressive and it would be a shame to knock it down.

So there you are, a trip through my rose bushes.  Hope you enjoyed it!