flower Photography

Dear Reader,

This absolutely excellent weather we had last week was like a testament from God, that summer was finally setting it's foot in the UK. As if in celebration of this wondrous feat, gardens all over England burst to life in a spectrum of greens and a rainbow of flowers. My own garden was no exception to this. So in between writing up assignments and preparing presentations, I was spending as much time as I could in my garden, absorbing England's limited supply of natural vitamin D. 

While I was doing this, my multi-talented mother, who happens to be quite handy with a camera, took photos aplenty of our garden, over which her love's labours are not lost. She has given my permission to post those amazing pictures on my blog, so that I can give you, dear reader, a tour of our garden through my mother's eyes.      

This is the view you will see when you step out the kitchen door:

Ever since we got rid of our two plum trees 2 years ago, me and mum have focused our efforts on growing a whole range of berries.

The first thing you see, the Gooseberries - they still have to ripen and become red. 

Strawberries in flower

The strawberries have already begun to grow on this one. You can even see that one has already begun to blush, hidden beneath the leaves. 

The grapes and red currents are currently small green dots at the moment and not very visible in all the foliage. They'll probably ripen in August most likely, so I'll add pictures of them then. Neither I nor my mum have taken any pictures of my herb pots (oregano, tarragon, sage and mint) or my cherry tomatoes because, honestly, they're not very impressive at the moment. But here are some things that are much more pretty and impressive:

Such pretty snapdragons. There are more in different colours but I  don't have  pictures of those.

This rose we gave to my mother quite a few years ago for her birthday. Since then we've called it "the Birthday rose"

And even more flowers!

But this one is my favourite:

You, dear reader, can't tell how wonderful and strong it's scent is from the pictures, but believe me when I tell you, it's really really really strong and intoxicatingly sweet.   

As you can probably tell by now, my mother and I are unreasonably fond of roses. There are, in fact, a lot more in our front garden:

Again, you won't believe this, but these actually smell like an odd combination of rose and lemon blossom.

When the buds of this one are just open, they look like little fists of snow balls.  

Okay, so these aren't roses but geraniums. But they're pretty and smelly all the same.

And this is what I found in my bedroom this morning.

I know this has little to do with gardens but, honestly, that is the biggest moth I've ever seen. It's half the size of my palm!!! I suppose I should have seen this coming, what with leaving my windows fully open over night.  Not that I have a problem with this. It's a rather graceful moth and fits in with the flowery theme of my bedroom. I wonder if it mistook my wall boarder for real flowers?

Nida