Flowers

A bit of colour

This is a random post with very few words (something I’m sure some people will be very pleased to read) and half a dozen photos of flowers. That’s all, no stories about seagulls, old signs, or random French cars. Just flowers.

I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but in our part of the world, there hasn’t been much (if any) rain for a very long time. England’s green and pleasant land has turned into England’s yellow and arid land, at least in the south. There’s a world-famous garden not far from here, the RHS garden at Wisley where, last time I read a headline, there hadn’t been any “meaningful rainfall” for 47 days.

That’s a lot of days.

That same garden has now made plans, apparently, to move its hydrangea collection to one of the other RHS gardens further north (first it was our politicians heading to Manchester, now it’s our hydrangeas). Looking out of my office window at the wilting display in the flowerbed closest to the house, I think that’s probably a very sensible plan.

Closer than Wisley, we have Windsor Great Park which I’ve written about before. I went there today for a lunchtime stroll, and headed into the Savill Garden, a rather attractive more formal garden which was laid out after the great storm of 1987. It is beautifully planted, and some parts are still being carefully irrigated (I hate to think how complicated the water management plans are in a place like that).

I’m not going to say that I actually did it, but I definitely considered leaping into one of the flowerbeds which were being sprayed, shouting “I’m a dahlia, I’m a dahlia”, just so that I could enjoy the pleasure of fresh cool water landing on me, for the first time in a long while.

One of the reasons for writing this little post is so that I can remember it when, in a few months time, I’m grumbling about the cold and the incessant rain, and the other is, as I said back in the first paragraph, to share a few photos of flowers, taken just an hour ago and lightly edited for your delectation and delight.

So, step into the garden with me and, if you feel like it, grab my hand and leap into the flowerbed with me too, shouting at the top of our voices.

All together now, “we’re dahlias!”.

Doesn’t that feel better?

Thank you for reading!