Merry Christmas from my London Garden

Thank you to all of you who has been following me on Facebook and Instagram through my blogging break, I am better now and have been able to do some pottering around the garden the last couple of weeks. The weather has been unusually dry for the time of year and last week I actually had the garden hose out and watered the whole garden – in December! I can’t remember ever doing that before, but it was necessary, we haven’t had any substantial rain yet and the few times it has rained it hasn’t mounted to much. Even Wednesday this week, when the whole country was promised buckets of rain....what did we get here in London? Some measly drizzle for a couple of hours. As I am writing this, UK is bracing itself for storm Barbara and we were supposed to get 6 hours of rain this evening. We did get some rain and it was heavy for a short time, but it just barely covered the bottom of a tray I left out to catch rain water. Here in the quiet corner of the South East we are mostly spared the winter storms and a lot of the rain, I know there are other parts of UK that has had more rain than they would wish for lately so sometimes it would have been nice if we could share it a bit more evenly between us :-)

Decorating with lights – inside and outside

There is a price to pay for too much of anything good. I think we can all agree that too much nice food ends up on your hips. Too much of this nice weather has resulted in record breaking rainfall with flooding many places here in Britain, and tomorrow we are facing storm number 5 in just 6 weeks. Here in the more protected and quiet corner of South East storm Eve will probably be just windy weather and a lot of rain though. Not that we need any more rain, whenever I walk around in the flower beds here in my new garden, my wellies make a ‘squish – squelch – splosh’ sound for every step I take, and the clay soil that was hard as concrete and I had such a struggle getting a spade through in the summer is now absolutely perfect - for pottery.

Wordless Wednesday

Merry Christmas!

Decorating for Christmas – part 2

Last week I wrote a post about making Christmas decoration, here comes the second part. For me, the Christmas period is mainly about bringing light into the house, as during these weeks in December, daylight is in short supply and decorating with light is good for the soul and lifts the spirit. But why stop with having decorative lights indoors when you can have them outdoors too?

Decorating for Christmas - part 1

My collection of orchids is currently counting 8 different pots of various sizes, 3 of them are in my living room, the rest are crammed next to my small kitchen window. 6 of the orchids are Phalaenopsis orchids and although I have read many places that these orchids don’t have a particular flowering time and can flower whenever, in my house they all follow a set routine and start to send up flower spikes one by one during the autumn and early winter. At one point in early spring I usually have all of them in flower and it is a spectacular sight!