Colours and Cameras...
Sitting in the cottage with the puffy heater pushing warm air onto my camera. Oops. Oops. Oops. For two days and two nights it has been hanging outside on the apricot flowering Crepuscule rose. Alas, not Crepuscule-Cam, just an absent-minded gardener who has been away hiking. Meanwhile evening temperatures have been low, and there has been much dew...
Crepuscule Rose on the Pergola
Friday 9th November
Yesterday (while my camera was unintentionally swinging in the breeze) my friend and I went hiking on the Tirimoana Walkway, over a working farm to a deserted beach and back. Culinary highlights - a shared scrumptious lunch (quarters of gourmet herb sausage, slim slices of Camembert, dates, squelchy prunes), savoured while sitting on wobbly driftwood under the cliffs drinking hot apple and blackcurrant tea. Yum!
Magenta Foxglove :- The foxgloves in my garden have started flowering, and I seem to have a lot of magenta ones, as usual.
The colours on this walk are simple - brown dirt tracks, blue sky, shining green grass, and muted beige and grey cliffs. There's no flashing magenta foxglove here to distract the eye and confuse the palette.
On the return walk we discussed the soapy story line of Series Three, Downton Abbey (which is mid-season here). Aha! My personal scenarios for Lady Edith and Ethel the unfortunate maid are brilliant, even if I say so myself...
It Still Goes!
Now - back to the camera problem. A nervous switch flick to see if it still goes? Scary... Phew! Yes, it does! Let this be a lesson to me... My latest pictures of the purple rhododendrons, the last to flower, are still there.
Late Flowering Purple Rhododendron
Today my multi-coloured garden gets me back, and I will not let it down. My cottage garden is flowery and blue - the lupins are in their second year, much bigger and floriferous, and I've acquired more indigo-blue aquilegias.
Blue Lupins, Green Cottage
My Green Cottage
This is the first spring-summer for my cottage being green (as opposed to its original brick-red colour), and it nestles much more naturally into my garden's colourscape. I'm so glad I painted it - and that the paint (which was recyced, so cheap) hasn't all peeled off. I thought green would be too subtle, forgetting that my garden is more important in the visual partnership.
Much Later...
I've been digging out weedy Alkanet (which is so spready and annoying) and planting flowering annuals all day, watering as I go. I'm trying to think colourfully - pink Lavateras and candy-striped Cosmos packed together by the compost heap near some pink roses, cool blue Salvias scattered underneath my new striped roses as a colour foil.
Ooh - I can't wait to see what these look like in flower! Stripes are delightfully difficult to ignore, and I'm bound to have made some colour blunders, hee hee... Should be fun!
Westerland Rose
Dribbling...
A thought. My rose gushing has turned into a dribble, because so many more have started flowering now. The beauty of rose flowers always defies description. But still I try.
Westerland by the house is such a vibrant, beautiful colour. The red Robusta across the pond is flowering (forming a delightful colour echo with the red hats of all my gnomes). Even Dublin Bay, rusty rose that he is, looks nice and neatly red.
John Clare, the deepest pink David Austin, has just a few gorgeous blooms, and up high behind the glasshouse the large rugosa shrubs (like lemon Agnes) are looking wonderful. And the climbing roses on the pergola are blooming, too - bright red Casino, pale pink Gerbe rose, and apricot Crepuscule, such a stunner.
Alas, my collection of rose adjectives is exposed again as being woefully inadequate - unlike my collection of roses itself, I must add. Roses do that to us, don't they? Maybe grabbing a Thesaurus might help my rose-prose become more colourful...