09 Jan Friday…with very little

The garden is pretty bleak at the moment…and also a complete mess!

The are faint reminders of the Summer and Autumn, but they really are just fading glimpses…

The chocolate cosmos has done better this year than ever before and has been flowering constantly for about 3 months, but I think this really is the last one… However, there are major glimpses of Spring too…

Once I’ve pulled away all the brown montbretia leaves ( although I feel it may just be a bit early to get rid of them all as they sort of insulate the ground ) there are Snowdrops and Hyacinths  on their way… …but the Nasturtiums have well and truly had it! I’m not sure what’s going to happen with these Giant Echium though, as I thought they’d flower in the Summer, and if a frost get’s these now, they’ll be killed overnight, so I’m seriously thinking of buying some fleecy stuff to keep them going… This is a branch of red berries which look highly poisonous to me, although I’m not sure what they are…I picked them at my Mums back in October and they’ve become a sort of garden decoration as it’s all desperately in need of colour… The Bronze Fennel has already started sprouting new stems, which I think will be ok as this is quite a sheltered corner, and the purple Heuchera and Perennial Wallflowers ( which have buds on at the moment ) are also doing well here… ( although the glass bauble a friend made me 20 years ago is unfortunately not doing so well! )The Arum Lily also seems to be liking it in a bit of shelter…

( and another bit of garden decoration from my Mum’s! ) …but this rose has really surprised me; I came back from Italy in the Summer and it looked completely dead and dried up. Obviously I felt awful and tried to perk it up and brought it up to near the house where I thought it might be a bit warmer, and now it’s done this!!

I’m a bit scared of rose growing as it always seems a precarious investment, and I’ve always been under the assumption that there’s ‘lots to do’ to look after roses, so I’ll just have to see if I can keep it going now… So…I was determined today to try and make something out of not much, as although there’s lots going on in the garden, there’s not much to pick at the moment…I separate the colours so that I’ve got a sort of palette which I can then mix up later…
( the orange rose hips were from inside the house… ) I started trying to arrange something but the crunchyness of the dead leaves doesn’t lend itself as easily to a natural movement and flow… …so I started again Everything here ( apart from the orange rose hips ) came out of the garden……I just needed to add the pencil and the magnifying glass!