Colourful July flowers - GBBD

It is the middle of the month and Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day - and I have been pondering about what to call today’s post. I named the previous post ‘From a rainy London’ and I am afraid that title is still just as appropriate despite that we have been repeatedly promised better weather. OK, so we have had one day here and there without rain, today was such a day and it was brilliant the few moments when the sun was shining. We might be in for a week of better weather starting from tomorrow, but we have been promised hot summer weather so many times now so I am taking one day at the time. Yesterday I had my iPad with me out in the garden where I can see BBC weather for my postcode hour by hour and for every hour it said sunny intervals – while the rain kept coming and going and I had to seek shelter in the shed together with my camera. So much for local weather forecast!

I have so much in flower right now that I can't possibly show you everything, and even just one photo of each plant would have been way too many photos so today I have used the mosaic feature extensively. Fill up a mug of your favourite brew and come for a walk with me in my July Garden.

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.

The joys of a new garden, #1

When I moved into my new house 6 weeks ago I could not wait to get started on my new garden and I must admit that unpacking my stuff and getting my house sorted has been a slow process as my garden is calling for me to come out every spare minute I have. It has been an exciting process to discover what I actually have inherited, but at this point it is a bit daunting too, with all the decisions I have to make. I have been blogging about my old garden for 4 ½ years and I have learned so much from all of you kind and experienced gardeners out there, and over the years I have been contributing in my small ways with my share of hints and tips and trial and errors too. Now I am calling on all of you gardeners to come with your helpful advice to some of the tasks, problems and decisions I am facing in my new garden, perhaps together we can come up with some solutions :-)

March flowers in London – GBBD

Winter is well and truly over here in London and we have had spring for a good while now. Last year everything was incredibly early, this year most things are just about normal – if such things exist. Perhaps I should use the word average instead, as every of the 16 winters I have been in London seem to have been different. The first year I was here we had an amazing summer just like last summer and a mild winter just like last year’s winter. I foolishly thought that this was how the climate was in London. How wrong I was. But even though it varies, the two really cold winters I have experienced here were nothing compared to what I was used to from Norway and I really appreciate what I am able to grow here and the early spring we get.

June GBBD in London

Did you see Gardeners’ World on BBC this week? Monty Don said it was only one word to describe the garden this month and that was ‘Lush’. I couldn’t agree more, although in my garden, lush seems a bit inadequate word these days, my garden is filling up and has already started to take on the jungle feel it gets in the late summer.

Cooped up indoors

The relentless rain and stormy weather is continuing here in Britain, we are well into the third winter month and the third month of the same pattern of days and days of rain and wind with the odd single day of clear and sunshine. For me here in London, this winter has mostly meant a very mild winter. I have not suffered any flooding like many people have done here in the south. But my garden is so saturated with water that I am wondering if everything will survive or if bulbs and herbaceous plants has started to rot. Every time I lift up one of my several hundred pots and containers in my garden, a flood of water runs out of the bottom. It feels strange after having worried about getting enough water to my garden last summer when we had such a long spell of warm weather. It seems a rather long time ago now, but it is only 7 months ago.

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!