June in Bloom

Here are the wonderful we’ve had growing down on the flower farm this month.

It’s been a hot hot month in the field. Our rose beds are in their first year so we’ve been disbudding their first buds and feeding them (with natural fertiliser, comfrey and muck) to bulk them up, only once they’re bigger allowing them to put their energy into flowers. The aphids were bad but they got washed off (no nasty pesticides here!) and can’t see any now.... *huge sigh of relief*

For more photos and updates you can follow us on Facebook and instagram.

Love Harriet x

A highly scented Duchesse de Nemours Peony that I really wish you could smell... it’s stunning in every way. I have been disbudding these (literally taking the buds off to help strengthen the plant so that it bulks up and produces more stems after 3 years - long term growing!) and this is the first one I’ve ever seen! What a treat! Everything about it is calm, serene and elegant. We need a huge amount of that in this home-schooling household right now...

Orlaya, Orlaya, Orlaya... what would early summer be without you? And why oh why are you so pernickety to germinate? Mine seems to do best grown in the autumn and over wintered, maybe when the seed is freshest? Orlaya is super pretty, lovely on its own but really sings in a bunch of brights. We generally have Orlaya from mid to late May (depending on the weather) in to July when carrot root fly does for it... like daucus, ammi and cowparsley Orlaya is a member of the carrot family, only with a name fit for a fairy. Pretty isn’t she?

I distinctly remember jugs of Sweet Williams on our kitchen table when I was a child. My mum had a cutting garden before it was a ‘thing’ and still grows magnificent flowers, but I’m fairly sure the Sweet Williams were bought at Richmond’s Saturday Market flower stall as a weekend treat before her annuals got going. We had big vases of sweet Williams at our wedding. They remind me of happy times and signal the start of summer....

‘Colibri’ Papaver Nudicaule: Crepe paper petals, frothy stamens. Beguiling beauty from a hard shelled bud that cracks open as the petals unfold. Sometimes you can be too close to things to see them clearly, but there is truth too in Blake’s brilliant opening of Auguries of Innocence “to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower’. I think of these words a lot when I zoom into flowers to photograph their detail. There is such beauty in such tiny transient fragility. And I think of the conversation I had one sunny Saturday in Cockermouth last year with an artist and photographer whose life was cut short by coronavirus this spring. A lot can happen in a year, but people can be remembered and eternal truths can be found in flowers.