Garden Delights For Tender Hearts

Hasn't it been a glorious day today?
Well, it has been here!
I've told you before that I live in the wetlands of The Netherlands - the delta of all deltas, where the atmosphere is naturally moist, the humours are damp and the skies are often grey and low.

My violas and English grass - such easy going plants.

So it is not very baffling that we crave sunshine, colour and warmth, especially after the long wet grey winter months.
And then...when the sun does come out, we do too. We rush to our garden centers to stock up on compost, pots and plants. The Dutch summers are short, so there's no time to waste!
I love it. The only snag is that it is an expensive hobby when you buy everything from the center. So this year I decided to sow my own seeds, and hopefully first save myself some money on the plants, and second save myself money again because I've grown a lot of my own salad greens and veg.

Radicchio and sunflowers

So my window sill has been chock full of all kinds of containers holding seedlings. Viggo has been quite annoyed to be unceremoniously shoved to the corner. He has taken his sweet revenge though, by nibbling on the seedlings. Mwah. I have plenty.

They are growing very rapidly, so today I potted them on.

Having my own two cats and most of the neighborhoods kitties around as well, and plenty of song birds, I have had to cover it up with netting.
There's two kinds of lettuce in the 5 black containers, sugarsnaps and swiss chard in the wooden box and right in the back is more lettuce. The rather bedraggled plant in the foreground is a beloved hanging plant I overwintered in the attic. It is a bit sad, because I divided it, which gave it a shock. But it is gorgeous when in bloom and it will flower until the first frost.

This is my herb table, but as you can see I can never resist adding some flowering plants as well.

To add some colour to my mostly green beds, I've planted lilies, which will be in bloom in June/July. I adore lilies; they look lovely and smell wonderful.

the herb table from the side

My part of the town is quite old, and most of the older traditional houses still have a traditional front garden bordering the road, instead of having it paved over and added a well-meant but often puny container with one hugely overpriced shrub (as dictated by stark minimalistic fashion)

This house is not far from my own, and every time I pass it (which is almost daily) I enjoy the magnolia. Isn't it wonderful?

Right. Time to do one quick round with the watering can.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

Spring in The Wetlands - It Has Arrived

Good morning, all over 80,000 of you, around the globe.
Hahaha, sure, I know there's nowhere near eighty-thousand of you logged in to my blog at a time, but seeing the number makes me a little proud anyway!

So...all of a sudden it is sunny. You have NO idea what that does to the average Dutchman! Or woman, in my case.
We rush outside, dragging high-pressure power cleaners with us , and our saws, and hammers, and grand-children (so much for enjoying the sunshine in peace in my back garden).  
In a moment, I myself will be rushing outside as well, as I want to start sowing my peas, and start hardening off my salad seedlings. And afterwards I need to do the weekend shopping.
Not terribly exciting I'm afraid.

I tend to upload my latest photos of my garden (and life in general) to Instagram these days. If you are interested in following me there as well as here, look for me under songsmith2962; my avatar is myself looking down at my mobile.

I realize this is a quickie; sorry about that, but the sun, the sun!
Talk to you later, bye!

Spring Has Sprung in Nieuw-Helvoet.

Good morning you all, everywhere.
The predominant Spring colour around my house is yellow - but that's hard to see, so off-yellowish it is for my script...

Isn't it wonderful that the long, wet winter has almost passed? Today is the Spring Equinox, and our days are getting longer and the nights shorter and personally I cannot wait for those long evenings in the garden, wrapped up in a thick blanket (this is The Wetlands after all) as near to the fire pot as I can get without catching fire. The good thing about our Wetlands spring weather is that it keeps your beer/white wine nice and cool.

My new garden is a bit basic, but it does have some nice nettles... 
Last week I cut down the shrubs which needed cutting back, and I now have a neat pile of branches I need to get rid of. I tried to burn them, but they are too green to burn and my neighbours somehow didn't take to the smoke they produced... I'll have cut them in small pieces and give them to our garbage truck to take away, as this garden doesn't have room for a compost heap.

Do you know something, my cat Viggo has made friends with quite a few of the other cats in my street, and now wants to spend his nights out on the pavement, chilling with his mates. He has almost lost all the weight he put on whilst in confinement when we just moved house, and is very content.
I swear that every house in this street has at least one cat and most of them has at least one dog as well, and they all grin at me when I walk past with both my old dog Gina and cat Viggo in tow, except for one grumpy terrier who always needs to bark at us and makes me jump, as he hides behing the bushes and then runs out barking like the mad little dog he is.

All in all we are very happy here in our new part of town.
Hope this Sunday finds you happy as well.

A Goodbye (by Viggo and Me)

Good afternoon, where ever you are!
This is an Autumnial goodbye of sorts.
I have finally found myself another house, you see. But with a small garden, yay!
This post is to help me say goodbye to my present garden, which I have put in a lot of hours and heaps of love to make it beautiful.

When we arrived here almost 23 years ago, the garden didn't deserve the name! It was a barren plot of land with an untrimmed conifer hedge, a load of nettles and one clump of red tulips. Which has survived to this day, mind, so that were some sturdy tulips!

We started by putting in a liguster hedge and trimming those conifers, and then slowly but surely dug it over, created borders, planted trees, built sheds, put in a greenhouse and finally dug a pond.

Due to circumstances I am leaving this garden, and it is the one thing (although to me it is more than simply a 'thing') that I have trouble leaving behind.

Hi fans, Viggo here!

Yep. It is true. We will be leaving this property in a couple of weeks time. 

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I will be shot of that Maine Coon, absolutely a positive development. But on the other hand, I grew up here! My woman brought me here as a youngster of tender months, and I walked my first walk outside and caught my first mouse in front of that shed. Not to mention my frogs... I will miss my frogs so much!

But I understand that my woman has no other option. And in fact that I am lucky and should count my  blessings. I could easily have ended up an apartment cat...with only a litter tray. The horror!!!

Most of the plants are already going dormant, but some of them are still making the effort to look their best.

Where I am moving, another part of the same town, I am near the polder as well, so that will be good. And there is a small garden, mostly paving stones but with some shrubs, so I can try to entice the small birds there as well. No room for a pond, but never mind.

She'll do everything to make that garden a tiny paradise for me as well, wanna bet? 

And there will be mice there as well, I'm sure.

She's told me there are quite a few other cats in that street though...I will have to have loads of crunchy nibbles to keep my strength up!

Right, tar rah!

My Pond Fish Have Started A Fish-Protest-Group.

Oh dear, all of a sudden my gorgeous pond has turned into a mini Everglades with hardly any water visible...
I swear my goldfish have started their own pressure group: FISH FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM.
And when I was trying to restore some order (and find the water), I expected an alligator to stalk me.

If you look closely you can see the fish swimming around in the foreground,waving their placards.

So I fiddled around a bit with one of those professional looking, but oh-so-akward-to-use, pond appliances which consists of a long pole, a wire, a handle and a cutting knife. Within 3 minutes my back was aching and my fish had fled to the other side of the pond. Perhaps our riot police should start waving those cutters about instead of pelting protesters with tear gas.

Still, I managed to clear a bit of water. 

Ah....look....happy fishies.

Autumn really has arrived in The Wetlands now. It smells of apples, leaves turning and wet earth in my garden. Before long the fish will have plenty of clear water again, when all that greenery will die down.
But until then I will enjoy the pond jungle.

Note to Self: try to find a house with a pond.

Happiness is in the Details - Gardening in the Wetlands

Good afternoon (or evening/morning, depending where you are on this globe of ours).
Today we are having typical Wetlands weather: 18 degrees and alternately sunny or cloudy, very windy and sometimes threatening rain. Hence: sweater on - sweater off whilst in my garden. I'm used to it.

The garden is absolutely lovely right now. The wind has not damaged much so far, and we have been lucky with the sudden night frost of a week ago (June! I mean, really!) as well.

Since hubby has cut down our ailing plum tree last Autumn as it was threatening to fall onto our greenhouse, our roses get more light, and it shows! We have more roses in bloom than last year, and they look healthier as well.

I adore roses, so I make certain I walk past them at least four times a day, and sometimes even more often.

This is Snow White (Sneeuwwitje in Dutch), isn't it gorgeous?

And this is a nameless Pink we got from my Mum some years ago, as it was ailing on her balcony.  It is doing very well in our garden, thank you very much, and produces flowers almost as large as  my hand.

And again I have dissuaded hubby to tear out the monarda, as I like it. He doesn't, because it produces loads of huge leaves and 'walks' through the flower bed. It is a sloppy plant. I like sloppy (must be because I'm rather sloppy myself).

Hope you liked the photos, until next time!

Am I Blue? - The Beauty of Flowers in the Blue Spectrum.

My garden is blooming as if it is afraid there will be no tomorrow...
Not that I am complaining, mind! I adore sitting there with a cup of coffee very early in the morning, when my neighbourhood is still asleep, and watch the bees and bumblebees visit my poppies and digitalis. Viggo and Gina by my side; they are wise to this morning ritual.

And this morning I want to talk to you about my love of flowers in the blue spectrum.

Spring starts with white and yellow, in the Wetlands. In February/March, when our earliest bulbs start showing their colours. They are followed by blue and purple, if you ignore the fact that our tulips show every colour under the rainbow (even black!). Tulips do not count; I like them, but they are very very contrived.

In my garden white and yellow is followed by blue and purple, believe me! And there is a period, right now in fact, when the white and yellow mix with the blue and purple.

There is something about these blue and purple and pink flowers that speaks to my soul. 

Sounds a bit melodramatic, I know. 

Yellow is a cheerful colour, but flowers in the blue spectrum have an introspective quality in my opinion. It is not a coincidence that melancholy has got the label 'The Blues'. 

Here you have the ordinary Cornflower. I allow it to seed itself everywhere it likes, simply because I adore it. When I was a child that devoured books, I used to read about cornflowers in the cornfields, except in our cornfields there were none...The wild flowers were sprayed to death in the sixties and seventies. Thank Frith that nowadays they are allowed to bloom again, and well-thinking farmers even sow them in the verges! It makes for wonderful bicycle rides, I can assure you!

This 'butterfly' lavender is another favorite of mine. I always make certain I have one next to the garden table, where it scents that entire corner.

I have shown you those two photos before, but they prove my point. Lovely, lovely colours!

(By the way, if any of you know how I can upload them so that they are positioned right next to each other, please tell me how to! I cannot)

So. Blue Spectrum? Yes, please!

Oh...go hang 'em! Hanging Baskets of the Wetland Garden.

Told you that we are enthusiastic gardeners, right? Since our borders are full to bursting, we have resorted to hanging baskets everywhere. A person must do what a person must do...

Our Willow doubles as a post, as do the other trees and chains between those trees. In this example we have combined Petunias with Phlox, Lobelia and Campanula.

Lobelia and Petunia have always been a favorite, but it is only recently that we have discovered the Campanula to be a really good basket plant. It flowers all through summer, and you can even cut it really short and it will grow bushy again and will flower again. Another wonderful characteristic of this plant is that it is resistant to the snails and slugs, who use our garden as their Summer Festival grounds.

This plant I will travel for! Streptocarpus is its name. We were given a sample a couple of years ago as an indoor plant, but it loves it outside and will flower and flower, until the first frost kills it. (This happend, even in our greenhouse...I'm ashamed to say). Ever since I try to get one for the garden every year, and as it is quite rare, I usually have to search the garden centers for it. I think that this year I will try to get it through winter indoors!

Okay, I know, technically this isn't a hanging basket, but the Dianthus combined with the Phlox and again Campanula is explosive, don't you think? It lights up this otherwise dark corner of the garden, especially when it is in the late afternoon sunlight.

The grouping of pots underneath the ghost Birch, combined with the Forest Bluebells, always gives me great joy. The red plant on the left is a Begonia with huge flowers, who is hanging its branches under its own success...they are so heavy with flowers that they almost break.

Joke! 

No, this isn't a smuggled lizard from Rome, it is a lizard from Rome who still is in Rome. Promise!

I would like it to be in my garden, though, because it would colour beautifully with my plants :-)

No More Sun for the Wetlands - But My Garden Is Blooming.

Just a quick post to share my lovely garden with you.

Like it?

Great!