These are the ones that should have gone in the post yesterday, only I hadn’t taken them till after I wrote the post. Some of the blossom is from my neighbours’ gardens and I have included a shot of a thatched cottage on the High Street. The plum blossom is alongside the big field in Badocks Wood.
Please do identify the blossoms if you know them, to me one pink flower on a twiggy tree is not always easy! ( I think I know mahonia, forsythia, cherry and the magnolia stellata is in my garden.)
As you can see the sun didn’t quite make it through the clouds but I think today might be the day. Have a lovely weekend ! (Brian took the magnolia pic on his Canon G10).
PS If anyone is curious about the history of the thatched cottage at 166 Henleaze Road, Google books has The Henleaze Book by Veronica Bowerman and you can read about the cottage on Page 32. (There is a lovely photo of it being rethatched included there too) What is striking about Henleaze is that much of it was farmland and large houses until comparatively recently, a good example of the way cities develop, taking in more and more land for housing as their populations grow; the local quarries have become a children’s play park and a swimming lake.
Garden History has become very popular in England since the 1970s and has gone hand in hand with the restoration of many lost and overgrown gardens from the grand gardens at Hampton Court to this small 18th century hillside gem. The West of England is full of wonderful places to visit, (well England as a whole is stuffed with gardens but I thought I should plug my region here,) and if you like a few follies thrown in with your herbaceous borders, then this is the place to come.
This week the sun shone and we headed off to see the snowdrops which we missed last year. Painswick Rococo Garden is reputed to have one of the greatest collections of naturalistic plantings of this beautiful early flower in the country. As we drove home we saw more spreading over banks by the road. En masse they all look very similar, but there are different species and they are avidly collected by snowdrop fanciers.
We had a pot of Earl Grey and a shared slice of fresh coffee cake once we had clambered up the hillside past the Eagle House, having visited the Pigeonnier, looked into the clarity of the Plunge Pool, admired the vista from in front of the Exedra and generally mooched about in this 18th Century Pleasure Garden.
In the meantime the kitchen is swamped with the smell of bitter Seville Oranges – the aroma of January in England
Zeb Bakes 