Peonies or paeonies?

My spell checker always corrects me when I spell peonies with an a, but I am used to spell it ‘paeonies’ so it’s hard to stop doing it, besides – who said the spell checker is always right?! In this case, both spellings seems to be just as correct, so I am going to continue spelling it with an a, and just simply ignore my spell checker :-)

June bloomers

The rain is hammering on my windows as I am sitting down to write this post – will it ever stop raining?! We had a brief spell of nice weather earlier today, with overcast and sunny intervals, but it didn’t last for many hours. I am so sick of all the rain now, I need a long period of warm sunny weather to make up for all the cold and rain we have had. It has rained almost every day since first week of April, only interrupted by a short period of sunny days the last week of May.

The Illuminating Blogger Award

I keep apologising for not posting here very often, but tonight I have to come with a big apology: I was nominated for my second blog award nearly 3 weeks ago, and I have not yet done the required linking and thanks! I am still recovering from my recent pancreatitis so I guess I have a valid excuse, but the days and weeks are going very quickly so I thought I better write a post about the award before the whole thing gets forgotten.

Will it ever stop raining??

I am still on the mend from my pancreatitis last month, taking it easy, sleeping a lot, not doing much and my garden is pretty much taking care of itself these days. Fortunately I guess, the rain has come back; we have had so much rain that the hosepipe ban we were threatened to have to struggle with until Christmas now is likely to be lifted within the next month or so. Good for the water reservoirs, good for our gardens, not so good for sun thirsty people of Britain.

I’m still around

Have you been looking for news from my London garden? Sorry for being absent for such a long time, but my short stay in hospital for a simple stomach operation turned out to be a bigger ordeal than expected. I contracted pancreatitis as a complication from the operation and although I am now home from hospital I am still recovering and will be for a while. I haven’t done any gardening the last 2 weeks, but I have been able to enjoy some of the marvellous weather we have had lately. Finally summer came to Britain!

What’s flowering in my garden – and what’s not

It is the middle of the month again, we have reached May - and it is time to show what’s flowering in our gardens. Here in London we have experienced the strangest spring ever, with a relatively warm winter, a dash of high summer for a few days in March and then over 5 weeks of rain and persistently cold weather with very low night temperatures. My garden has never been as late as it is this year.

What’s eating my garden?!

We have sunshine! After something like 35 days of rain, either during daytime or night time – or both, we have finally got a few days with sun :-) I spent yesterday outside in the garden, and although it was a chilly wind, the sun made up for any lack of feeling of warmth.

A small miracle

I suppose we should almost have got used to the rain by now, after all it has rained for one month and 2 days straight. That, according to the Met Office, makes us qualified to collect the award of wettest April since record began more than a century ago. The rain has also led to unusually low temperatures and the gardens in London where I live are now really late compared to normal years.