A Cottage Garden

I love this little cottage garden.

It's in the show gardens at Bridgemere Garden World, near Nantwich in Cheshire.

Just a small garden but it's packed with gorgeous cottage garden plants.

In all the colours I love to see in a garden

Beautiful climbing roses

This colour was lovely and so hard to capture with a camera.

There were lupins in all colours

Mauves and pinks and purples all blending together

Lovely pink roses, I've no idea what variety they were.

Foxgloves

More lupins

These purple lupins looked wonderful against the white fence.

Everything in the garden was a feast for the eyes and senses.  I've downloaded these photos today to look at and enjoy as it is so damp, grey and windy outside and not like a June day at all.  Let's hope the weather improves soon so we can get back out into our own garden and hang washing out on the line to dry in the sunshine.

It's Lilac Time!

All of a sudden the lilac seems to be out; is it a little earlier this year, I wonder? I love lilac, both the lilac and the white varieties, as it reminds me of my childhood. We used to have a huge lilac tree in our front garden when I was a child and I loved its colour and fragrance. The flowers though, don't seem to last for very long but oh how gorgeous they are for a few magic days. We don't have a tree in our garden, the one in the photo above was taken at the Dorothy Clive garden last year. The one below I spotted in the gardens at Bridgemere Garden World on Sunday. There were many others but the sun was always too bright to take any decent photographs.

I took one or two other photos around the gardens as well - I though this hand sculpture was interesting.

This was called the Red Avenue, again the sun is at the wrong angle but the colours were stunning.

There was also a Vintage Vehicle display. I'm not an avid car lover, but I did like this one,

very Inspector Maigret I thought whereas the one below is probably more Miss Marple.

I have another childhood memory involving lilac - it is of my mother singing this song:-

We'll gather lilacs in the spring again,
And walk together down an endless lane,
Until our hearts have learned to sing again,
When you come home once more.
And in the evening by the firelight glow,
You'll hold me close and never let me go,
Your eyes will tell me all I want to know,
When you come home once more.

It's from the show 'Perchance to Dream' written by Ivor Novello in 1945, the words always bring a lump to my throat and a prickle to my eyes because some of them didn't come home, and for those that did life was never quite the same again.