Merry Christmas from The Serendipity Garden

I bet you all are busy preparing for Christmas right now, but maybe you can spare a moment and come and visit my garden for a few minutes? I have no photos today, just a movie which should set you in the right Christmas mood, should you need it :-)

Winter has arrived in London​

It's last week of November, bone chillingly cold, windy and just above freezing - typically start of winter in London. I even heard on the news today that there was almost 10 minutes of a few snow flurries in the air. Yep, it comes on the news when there is a few snow flurries in the air in London....doesn't happen that often you know! But nothing stops for a bit of cold weather in my garden, everywhere you turn there are flowers, you just have to look a bit closer and they might not be as showy as in June and July although some flowers are exceptionally showy and photogenic.

It’s fox eviction time!

It has been on the cards for a while; I think I have been patient – very patient to be honest. The fox cub is now an unruly 'teenager' and old enough to leave home, the mum has left the den long ago, the sibling cub is long gone or has passed away – mortality is about 50% among urban foxes - thankfully – or else we would be swamped with foxes! So 2 weeks ago one of my garden helpers and her husband were here and we dismantled the smallest of my shed to get access to the large void behind it to clear all the bramble and Virginia creeper behind it.

Where have all the trees gone?

It’s definitely autumn in London, can’t deny it anymore. The nights are getting cooler and we have had much welcome rain several times. We have even had our first storm, Aileen. But we have had many lovely, warm sunny days in September and this past week it has been absolutely lovely with many days around 25 degrees during the day. Every year at this time I invite a couple with their young son over for an afternoon and we celebrate her birthday just past and mine on the 9th October. It has become a tradition to have a picnic in my garden if we can, and with the lovely weather this year I had my fingers crossed for this year’s celebration which we are doing Sunday the 1st. However, the forecast is for heavy rain and to top it up we are getting the tail end of hurricane Maria and Lee this weekend so it will be rather windy....I think our picnic will be in my kitchen this year!

Can I find summer in Lost and Found?

Hello, I am still around....but someone took my summer and ran away with it – I can’t find it! And now the weather forecasters on TV keep talking about autumn. Eh? Not yet please, I want July and August first, I have been too busy, last time I looked at the calendar it was late June.

Patience, patience

They say patience is a virtue, but my goodness – my patience has been wearing thin lately when it comes to my bathroom adaptation. I have worked hard to drive the case forward since moving in here in May 2015 and I have no idea how long it would have taken if I had just left everything to the council, but this week the work started, FINALLY!!!

Roses, roses and more roses

Can you have too many roses? Silly question really, of course you can’t!

I have managed to squeeze in 31 roses in my tiny garden, among a whole lot of other plants – and I think I can manage to fit in a few more roses if I look carefully. There are tall climbing roses and tiny miniature roses and everything between. I will show you a few today, but all 31 are flowering beautifully right now.

A pixie, a wizard and a green man

I seem to start every blog this year by apologising for being so absent – this month I have been so busy I didn’t even think I would be able to put together a blog post but I keep taking gardening photos all the time and I managed to film last Friday so here I am again, writing a last minute post.

The Serendipity Garden

The time has flown away for me again – I am sitting here with 3 hours to go before the end of March, trying to put together a post about what’s happening in my garden right now. I have been so busy my feet is hardly touching the ground so this post is going to be brief and I will let the photos speak for themselves. There is an end to all this – well, I keep reminding myself that, although the amount of red tape the council has managed to create regarding my bathroom renovation is astonishing. I still haven’t got a start date for the work, but I am slowly getting there – I hope!

Goodbye winter, hello spring!

I can’t believe we are in March already, where did winter go? I have been so busy with so many things, and in my garden winter is one of the busiest times so I have tried to get a bit done now and then when I have been feeling up for it. The weather has slowed work though, it has been an unusually cold winter here in the South-East, but an hour here and there outside with 3-4 layers of warm clothes and good shoes and I can get a bit done. There’s LOTS still to do in my ‘new’ garden, but I am slowly getting there :-)

The longest month of the year

The longest month of the year – January – is over, it has been dark, unusually cold and unusually dry. We still haven’t had any substantial rain, only a little bit here and there, but the coming week is promising a bit of rain now and then so it might help. If we don’t get a couple of WEEKS of rain soon, I fear we will be in trouble by mid-summer.

I have braved the cold weather – which has been almost down to freezing for a couple of weeks....I must have been living for too long here in London, temperatures like 2-3 plus in January (35 F) would have been considered absolutely balmy years ago, now I think it’s pretty cold. But I can’t keep away from my garden for too long so in true Norwegian spirit of ‘There’s no bad weather, just bad clothing’ – I have been out in the garden a couple of hours most days during January.