Welcome to my blog!

Here, I journal the transformation of our tiny London backyard into a dream garden. I hope you will like it!

A dream garden, for me, is an outdoor space filled with rich colours and seductive scents, offering beautiful flowers, interesting textures and tasty morsels for our delectation. Also a source of nourishment for the local wildlife - birds, butterflies and bees. A space to enjoy with my SO, friends, family, and, of course, our cats. Somewhere to sit and have coffee, or even a meal, and a tiny patch of grass to lie on in the fleeting sunshine of the English summer. And, we're almost there...

Unless stated otherwise, all photos are by me (or my SO) and are clickable.

Monday, 30 May 2011

Bank Holiday!

Perfect time to do some gardening...

In addition to planting a new bright pink oleander and blue hydrangea, we (well, really my SO) put up a new trellis on the patio fence. The troughs contain (amongst tobacco flowers and catanache caerulea)cream-coloured sweet peas that will, I hope, scramble up the trellis and surround us with a beautiful scent when we start having breakfast/coffee/meals on the patio.


The rose pics are just a bonus! ;)


Saturday, 21 May 2011

More roses!

The old shrub is taller than me at the moment, and the blowsy flowers are bigger than my fist:


Another leftover, a small rosebush that didn't flower last year. There goes my "no yellow" rule! :D It's too beautiful to dislike...

The first stripy bloom of Ferdinand Pichard - and it's facing the garage! Still, plenty of buds on there to look forward to...

Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Late Spring Blooms

In addition to the roses from the previous post, there are a few other flowers currently on show.

The rhododendron, underlined by the new door paint:

Strongly scented pinks:

And a close-up of a Zephirine Drouhin rose:

Roses - First Flush

Four of our rose bushes have already burst into flowers.

The unknown large shrub, left over from the previous owners:

Heavenly-scented Gertrude Jekyll:

Thornless and sweet-smelling Zephirine Drouhin:

Another leftover shrub, from the front garden:

Those flowers are perfectly velvety:

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Monet's Giverny Part 2

I needed to split this into several posts, as I can only upload 5 photos in each. And I have so many pictures from Giverny...

Still in the courtyard garden next to the house. There were also white areas, like this tall fox lily with pansies in the background:

And hot, purple and bronze smouldering schemes like these irises and pansies:

This sunny border has made me reconsider my "no yellow, no orange" rule for our garden:

There was a huge tree peony shrub, the flowers are the size of soup bowls:

And this is a bit how our garden is supposed to look like - if only it were three times the size... There are tall globes of ornamental onions, purple tulips and blue pansies, swathes of tiny forget-me-nots, pink and white stocks and verbena... Oh, and loads of sunshine! :)

Monet's Giverny

The second guest garden featured in my blog is the stunning Giverny, belonging to and immortalised by the great impressionist painter, Claude Monet.


The little town of Giverny is a stone's throw away from the Seine, roughly half way between Paris and its Atlantic coast mouth. Monet's house with the formally divided courtyard, as well as the stunningly informal water garden, are open to visitors every day of the week. We were there on a Sunday, and it was almost too busy; I would recommend a workday if you don't like crowds. However, the plants are so colourful and fragrant that I soon stopped noticing other people and got completely immersed in the beauty of nature.

There are a couple of round beds in between the house and the courtyard garden, with a formal planting of pink tulips through a sea of forget-me-nots.
Next to the house, which has quite a Provencal country cottage vibe, the planting was more random in form and colour.

The courtyard was divided into narrow rectangular beds separated by gravel paths, some of which were inaccessible. The beds were of different lengths, some running through the whole of the garden, and others only a metre or two long. Some were dedicated to a unifying colour scheme, like this one with blue iris, cornflowers and pansies.
Others were full of clashing colours, like these pink parrot tulips with yellow and purple pansies.


To be continued...