>My husband was in Denmark last weekend and we decided to spend the weekend in Copenhagen, enjoying a spring Saturday with a long stroll, lunch on a pavement restaurant and then a few too many beers at our regular place. Wonderful way to spend a sunny day and definitely a great time with my husband.
However… The weather forecast for Monday evening was still glorious before the weather would turn the night to today, Tuesday, so after work yesterday I got on a metro, changed to a train, changed to a bus and then strolled peacefully through the forest, picking a small bouquet of forest anemones on my way.
Yes, I admit it. I went a little overboard with the bucolic idyll, but the sun was shining, birds were chirping and I just couldn’t imagine hurrying under those circumstances.
Eventually I did arrive at the summer house, though, and it was stunning in the evening light:
And then there was the courtyard…
Now, obviously some of the pots contain plants and seedlings for the garden, but I like the overall impression of the slightly chaotic array of pots and plants; I think this is what both the husband and I want for the courtyard, only even more so. Keep the doors free and place a small table in the middle with two chairs for romantic breakfasts and lunches, but otherwise clutter the place up with pots of all shapes and sizes containing flowers and plants of all shapes and sizes and colours.
I also have two large pots in my flat at present, waiting to be taken up there when we rent a car for Easter, because they’re rather heavy even with my stubbornness.
As for pots that are NOT rather large… Here is one of the small pots with sempervivum that I planted just over a week ago. It’s a very small, shallow granite planter (perhaps 8″ external diameter) but it suits the houseleeks so well and looks very cute.
Anyway, stuff is sprouting! I can’t remember which seeds I stuck in this pot (ARGH! Am terrible gardener who keeps a notebook of what is sown, but not where or in which pot…), but at least they’re doing their stuff. Also, there are two more pots with little seedlings poking up, so YAY for seeds doing their thing even if the gardener isn’t keeping a very good record of what he does.
The alium bulbs are doing fine as well:
And there are the peony tubers:
I bought tubers for a red and a white peony (Karl Rosenfield and Shirley Temple), and one of them – in the picture – is doing very well, whereas the other seems a bit shy/dead. Also, in the garden I have three tubers of a purple peony that I rescued from the revamping of the area around my flat, and though they’re a bit behind the one in the pot they seem to be perky enough and ready to get going once it warms up a bit more.
The purple peony tubers are hiding to the right in this picture, but you can clearly see that the large blue iris rescued from the same place is doing well, as is the iris from my mother’s garden. And the asters are beginning to show, though they’re still more or less covered by the foliage of the aconites that came along as stow-aways when the asters were dug up and moved to our garden.
The picture above is my temporary nursery; the former site of a sand box that was the only lot of bare soil in the garden when we took it over. Eventually I guess this plot will be turned into lawn, but just to the right of it will be the Ambitious Border, so the plants will all find new homes there within this year.
The forsythia is just about to bloom, though I hope the gray weather forecast for the rest of this week will mean it holds off ’till Easter so my husband can enjoy the explosion of yellow.
And speaking of yellow…
The miniature daffodils – tête à tête – are on their last legs, and generally I find them a touch too twee for my liking, but still… The colour is great so while I won’t get any more of these I definitely appreciate that they came with the garden and I won’t be digging them up, especially since they’re in the Woodland Patch where little else happens now that the snowdrops and aconites have spent their bloom and the muscaris have yet to appear on the scene…
I didn’t do a lot up there last night. I enjoyed myself, took stock and soaked a few pots that had been left under the eaves of the house and then placed them in the middle of the courtyard so they would get some rain today.
I also brought up some more plants, of course; a pot of saxifraga, a pot of sedum ‘coral carpet’ and a pink rhododendron that will start it’s life in a pot in the courtyard but hopefully eventually make it out into the garden in a few years, possibly as a small centrepiece between the two large purple rhododendrons.
Anyway, the main point of going up there last night was to enjoy the weather and SPRING! And I did… I had a couple of hours of sunshine up there, and once the sun set I moved inside, lit a fire and reclined in a comfy chair with a good novel. (Okay, a thoroughly mediocre but very entertaining novel…) I went to bed fairly early, and then this morning I got up at 4:30 AM to have coffee and catch a bus, train and metro back to town, and all the way into work I had this serene feeling of being completely relaxed and de-stressed. It really was a great way to spend a Monday evening.
Only non-relaxing thing about this morning was the walk from the summer house to the bus stop. It was only just beginning to brighten a little, so you could see the white sheen of the birch trunks and the silhouettes of trees against the black-blue sky, but very little else. Well, I had a close encounter with nature, one might say… I walked along the road when suddenly I heard a noise and something dark bumped into me at some speed. It’s not the first time I’ve spooked and been spooked by a deer, but I do wonder how many others have been half knocked over by deer twice within 6 months. The deer must have been nibbling at the hedge at one side of the road, heard me and decided that the wisest route of escape was across the road and into the forest, which caused the collision with yours truly.
Seriously… I enjoy nature as much as anybody, but please could nature stop running into me!
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