Friday 6 May 2011

More garden Beauties

My garden gives me two types of pleasure:- it produces plants that are good to eat, and it produces plants that look nice to look at.

Right now there are so many beautiful things I want to photograph... (although actually many of these things will also eventually be eaten!). I'm away from home on a business trip at present, so I can't really write about what is happening in my garden, but here's a little selection of photos taken last weekend...

This Allium is one from a batch I planted several years ago and had considered extinct. This year one little flower has popped up again.

Allium
These chives are primarily a culinary herb of course, but their flowers are really decorative.

Chive flowers

This variegated Sage looks impressive, but its value as a herb is less than that of the stronger but less-showy plain green type.

Variegated Sage
 This is my new fern Dryopteris Erythrosora. I love the bronzy foliage. I expect it will go green later in the year.

Fern
 The tomato plants are just beginning to produce their first flowers. Aren't the stems hairy??

The first Tomato flower
 I'm not telling you what this one is. You should know by now. It was one of those in my recent "Do you know your seedlings?" post.

You know what this one is, don't you?
  The Land Cress is finished now, but I have left it to flower. This is in the corner next to my Cucumber tub, where it adds a bit of welcome colour to an area that would otherwise be very drab at present.

Even the Land Cress that has gone to seed looks quite nice
 What about this? An earwig perched on a stem of that plant with white flowers that I have still not been able to conclusively identify. Not beautiful in the conventional sense, but interesting I think.

Earwig - maybe not beautiful, but interesting nonetheless
Can't wait to get back home to see how things have progressed while I've been away. Still no rain in Fleet, I understand, so Jane as been in charge of the hosepipe...

8 comments:

  1. Wonderful macro work Mark. Safe travels and sending wishes for rain to Fleet.

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  2. hi Mark, have just discovered blogs and have started my own and love reading others, very impressed with your plot! Now the plant you are trying to identify is called Dietes iridiodes and can grow into quite a large clump,I have it in my garden in Central Victoria, Australia where it survives frost and vey hot summers.
    Cheers. Andrea

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  3. Is it legal to wish for rain in England?

    I still have no idea what the seedling is, let me guess - parsley?

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  4. Andrea; Thanks for visiting my blog - and for the lovely compliment. The plant with the white flowers is not Dietes I'm afraid. I have researched this one and "eliminated it from my enquiries".

    Ali; The seedling is NOT parsley! It's Coriander. But I admit that at that stage they are very similar. :)

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  5. You can eat chive flowers too can't you?

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  6. That's one of the things which strikes me over and over - how hairy plants are. It's something I hadn't appreciated until I started taking photographs of them.

    Lucy

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  7. Mark, you are really getting the hang of that camera. These are fabulous photos. That one of the variegated sage looks like someone's embroidery sampler.

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  8. Wonderful shot. I like the purple ones.

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