The June Garden

Midsummer

I’ve always thought it an odd time for ‘mid-Summer’ to occur, only weeks after Summer starts?!

The last of the tulips faded quickly (it was June after all)

The more usual summer flowers started to make an appearance.

including the poppies.

The Tale of the poppies

‘Miss Shirley’s ghost’

My Mum, Shirley, always had a thing about poppies.

When she was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 2013, it was the run up to the 100th anniversary year of the start of World War I and there was much ‘poppy chatter’ in the media. In her final days Mum kept asking us to sow poppy seeds around her garden, I knew then that she was really just giving us something to remember her by when they flowered after she had gone.

So, when she passed away, I decided, to share some Shirley poppy seeds at her funeral, so we could all remember her.

I sowed my seeds and had hit and miss success in the first year, with just one plant flowering.

The following year, however, that one plant spread its seeds freely and widely, creating a huge poppy meadow

and they’ve carried on ever since

They seem to like it best where I park the van - not the most convenient, but they’re so beautiful I work around them (often resulting in me having to do a thirty-point-turn to get the van out).

I have gathered thousands of seeds and now give them away willy nilly to anyone I meet. My equivalent of ‘Miss Wilmott’s Ghost’ (the familiar term for Eryngium Gigantium, so called because Ellen Wilmott, a nineteenth century gardener, liked to secretly scatter the seeds and it sprang up unexpectedly in her trail - ghost-like.)

I’m yet to scatter them unknowingly around peoples gardens a la Miss Wilmott, but there’s still time.

This year has only seen a few popping up here and there but I hope that means next year will be a bumper year?

early morning buttercup walk

This cow, we now know, was just about to give birth…

A couple of hours later

it’s a boy

For the first couple of days, the Momma cows leave the calf to ‘lie low’. She left him at the corner of our garden (amidst all the debris left from cutting the conifers down).

She came and checked on him regularly and offered reassuring rumblings, sometimes staying hidden just behind our ivy, almost as if she didn’t want to disturb him!

Three weeks later and he is now gamboling around the field with his other calf mates - if you watch my Instagram stories you will have seen them charging around tails high in the air. Such a happy sight.

Summer Garden Salad:

Pea shoots, nasturtium leaves & flowers, rose petals and rocket.

Shred generous amount of parmesan curls and add a dash of balsamic vinegar and a few sun-dried tomatoes.

Enjoy!

I’ll continue to encourage everything to loll and bend!

Thank you for reading.

I’ll be back at the end of July,

Fiona x