It was the Harrogate Flower Show this weekend and Mr L had bought me tickets for my birthday; so 6 months on and off me and my allotment neighbour went for a fun-packed day of looking at the show gardens and generally shopping and wishing we could afford some of the amazing products on show.
My two favourite show gardens were the hospice garden which was beautifully planted in silvers, whites and purples. There were 3 silver ball water features, one on each side of the bench and one at the entrance. I'm a great believer in having water in a garden, it's so calming and as this garden will be moved to the hospice I can imagine it will be a very restful place to be at a hugely difficult time for people.The other garden that I loved was the Tranquillity garden, mostly because of the Yorkshire Rose made out of the stones at the end of the pathway. I do like the back arbour and fencing though and I could absolutely imagine sitting there with a good book and a glass of wine!
I have never been to a flower show before so it was a very new experience for me. Some of the exhibitors had some amazing products. Luckily I didn't have my credit card or I might have bought a very expensive fountain and got into a lot of trouble from Mr L!! There seemed to be an agreement on prices because overall I'd say that most of the plants were consistently priced across the whole show. We did get some Himalayan blue poppies in small pots and there were only £5 for 2, all of the others were bigger and £6.50 each. I've already potted mine in a 9cm pot and given them some all season feed so hopefully they'll soon catch up to the bigger plants. We also found a stall selling willow wands; these were lengths of willow that you literally just push into the ground and they'll grow like a standard. They looked really great and I bought 3 wands with the intention to have them as a feature in my garden or maybe in the allotment. If they are going to be in the allotment I'll have to think about how to secure the pot.
Moving on to today we brought all of our purchases back to the allotment. I decided that the strawberry bed, which hasn't really been very successful needed to be cleared and then I can use it as a second flower bed. I took all of the strawberries out and then sorted through them all and kept anything that I thought would be viable with a view to pot them up for now until a new strawberry bed is ready in the new plot. I still have a bucket full of plants that I didn't manage to pot up because I ran out of compost so I'm hoping they'll survive for a few days until I get back up there again in the week. Strawberries are very resilient so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I might even pop some into some hanging baskets as well as pots.I'm going to have loads of sunflowers this year (I planted a packet of dwarf sunspot sunflowers thinking they wouldn't all germinate and they've all come up) so this bed will be a really good place for them because it's a lovely sunny bed. I've also got plenty of blackball cornflower and some blue cornflower too. I'm also hoping that my nigella will germinate because they're beautiful flowers. The purpose of these flower beds are to bring the pollinators into my plot but they're also lovely to look at so I'm looking forward to enjoying them as well. I want to make sure I get a good variety of flowers I can cut for the house as well as those that are attractive to pollinators and I'm hoping to get plenty that have a good scent to them as well.
Speaking of which, I bought a really big phlox which is called Clouds of Perfume and is absolutely beautiful and smells amazing. I'm not 100% sure where it's going to go yet but I know that I'll find the perfect spot for it and my initial thought is for it to be somewhere that I'll brush by it to release the scent.
I also bought some little narcissus for the existing flower bed. They're both unusual varieties and I thought they'd add some lovely colour to the bed and because they've got tiny flowers they're really very pretty. The other purchase that I'm deciding where to put is a wooden wind chime that is really pretty. At the moment I've put it into the polytunnel because even though it was an absolute bargain I don't want it to be stolen. I did a video tour of the polytunnel last week that I've been struggling to upload so watch this space (albeit that there's even more in there now!)
Until next time then
Happy Gardening x
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