More Garden Bounty

Here's some more garden bounty, but of a different sort. While I primarly enjoy growing things I can eat, I love looking at beauty and smelling sweet perfume so I also enjoy growing flowers whenever I can.


I learnt this trick from my mother, who is a rather dab hand at arranging flowers. They are an amazing way of brightening up a room. She usually has a bunch in one room or another around the house, but the toilet is the most likely place. I remember in one house, we would often have a small posy of violets from the garden sitting on the toilet cistern...just gorgeous against the dark green tiles. I've noticed that flowers last well there, out of direct sun but under a window to get a bit of light. And I find that I actually notice them more than in other rooms of the house. While it is nice to have flowers in the bedroom, I rarely go there during the day. On the dining table is a lovely spot, but our dining table seems to invariably be crowded out with one or more fruit bowls and various other bits of paper, etc that are yet to be sorted out. Grin. So while I do put flowers there, they tend to get overwhelmed a bit by all the other clutter. Similar problem in any other place that I actually have a suitable shelf or table to put them...I don't get to appreciate them as I would like to because they are actually hard to see (really should do something about our storage issues one of these days). So these lovely flowers, picked from the Big Garden earlier this week, made their way into the toilet room. It gets visited multiple times a day, and they greet me cherrily every time. They aren't cluttered with other things, and they make an otherwise dull place seem a little nicer. The other benefit is that I don't spend the day sneezing from the heavy sweet pea perfume, which is what happened for the 10minutes or so they spent on the dining table! You can't really see in the intensity of colour in the hot pink/red geraniums here. They are combined with sweet peas, some parsley seed heads, and a bit of flower off the oregano. The Big House doesn't really have a flower garden at present, so we pop flowers in around the herb patches, on the ends of the long beds, and along the front of the raspberries and passionfruit. I think it looks quite beautiful. We have cosmos, calendulas, borage, sunflowers and more coming along. I even put in a few along beside the driveway here and am so excited to see them starting to flower.

Where is your favourite place for a vase of fresh flowers?


Amy
Thursday, 6th January, 2011