This is going to be the last entry in my "Garden Diary" series. The garden is preparing for its winter rest. The project has brought me a lot of joy. It's made me love our garden even more than I already did. I'm going to miss taking the photos and preparing them for posting, here on LJ. Sharing the pictures has been a large part of the fun. I ( Read more... )

August has been a month of extremes. We’ve had temperatures of over 30C that left the garden parched, followed by torrential rain that flattened some of the taller plants. Fewer species started to flower in August than in the previous months but there were compensations. Some of the faded flowers are now forming seeds in a rather spectacular manner ( Read more... )

Getting comments on my Garden Diary posts has been an inspiration and a challenge. In my June post ladysnaps said: "I would love to see a full image of your entire garden... if that's possible. it's like an attraction you should charge people to enter.So, I’ve tried to capture the atmosphere of the garden as a whole, as a place that you would like to enter ( Read more... )

Sometimes the most spectacular flowers in the garden get there on a whim. A few years ago, we tried out salsify roots for a vegetable. We liked it. It has a special flavor, something like a cross between artichoke and celeriac. We had bought more roots than we needed and planted one in the herb garden. That plant is still there; it produces ( Read more... )

There was so much to see this month and it was over so quickly. I felt I hardly had eyes enough to take it all in. Let me start with the absolute star of the May flowers in our garden, the columbine (Aquilegia).


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The month of April is both the best and the worst month to go on holiday. The best because it is off-season and quiet, while nature is at its best. The worst because you miss what happens in your own garden. This year we completely missed the flowering of one of our most beautiful shrubs: the juneberry (Amelanchier). This is how it looked last year ( Read more... )

March 11th, early in the morning: Melting hoarfrost on the crocuses.


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While cleaning out some bookshelves I came across a forgotten treasure ( Read more... )