This is probably the first year since we moved into our house four years ago that I’ve seen a glimmer of the wild flower garden I hoped to create. When we relocated from London the garden was surrounded by conifers, which although were great for adding privacy to the garden, completely left it in shadow and left no room for any flowers.
After a bit of research we decided that the conifers had to go. It was an expensive and labour intensive job that left most of the flower beds with remnants of roots and our garden budget for the forseeable depleted.
Over the next year or so we started making a few trips to garden centres – being a florist I had an idea of the flowers I wanted to grow around the edge of the grass, in particular peonies, dahlias, poppies and roses. We invested in the plants on my wishlist – a David Austin rose, a magnolia, and forget-me-nots too and since then some have established and others we’ve lost (I’m looking at you Camelia) I also bought a wild flower seed box and scattered it on the right side of the garden hoping this would help my vision.
3 years on and the particular bed where I put the wild flower seeds has an abundance of foxgloves from cerise pink to coral and cream, poppies, forget me nots and I’ve planted Cosmos from seed and Zinnias too. There’s loads of foxgloves scattered around the garden so I think i’ll keep them condensed in one bed and remove the others and they’re poisonous, so as much as I love them, they’re not ideal with little boys playing in the garden.
I’m hoping to continue growing some flowers from seed over the next few years and maybe start a proper vegetable trough too. It’s hard as we want to eventually do some work to the back of the house and re-do the patio area so we’re not sure how damaged the garden will be afterwards, on the one hand you want it to look amazing to enjoy now, but on the other you don’t want to invest too much time and money if it is going to really suffer during the future works and we’ll end up having to effectively start from scratch again.
Right now is a great time as everything is budding and ready to burst into bloom. I’m hoping for an abundance of colour over the next few weeks. Here’s a few pics of flowers that are already showing off.
