In A Vase on Monday - Oranges and Lemons

Hello Everyone,

Monday is the day Cathy at Rambling in the garden asks us to share a vase of flowers picked from our own gardens - a task I'm very happy to perform. However, I did have to nip out between those April showers to make my selection to plonk in today's vase.

Still not exactly spoilt for choice but there's more to choose from than there has been over the first few months of the year. Spotted the pretty daffodils growing in one of the huge pots my husband has planted with spring bulbs (he never keeps labels so I've no idea what they are called) and whipped a few - there are so many he'll never notice!

In the interest of fairness, I sacrificed one of my treasured Sunlover Tulips - it's going to be a stunner when fully open! The splashes of orange can just be seen hiding in the yellow and those green tinged outer petals are delightful.

Just a week or two after Cathy suggested that I could probably find Caithness glass vases in charity shops I discovered this pretty little blue one in a DEBRA shop on a visit to Castle Douglas - how lucky is that! I now have a collection of two :)

I couldn't resist a few sprigs of our newly planted shrub, Forsythia Weekend 'Courtalyn'. It's replaced an old berberis, inherited with the garden, that was so thorny it made it impossible for me to weed out the ground elder that grew behind and the blackberry (bramble) that wound it's way through it. There's three very beautiful berberis still growing in other parts of the garden so I don't feel guilty about the removal of this one.

The foliage at the base of the 'arrangement' is from two pretty aquilegias, one white and the other pink, that have been in a pot for years ... I fear that if I transplanted them into the borders they wouldn't survive.

Garden update ... more on the new forsythia.

Forsythia Weekend 'Courtalyn', aka Golden Bells Weekend, is, I'm told, ideal for smaller gardens and, though the flowers are a much less brash shade of golden yellow than other forsythias, it will still create a striking harbinger of spring ... just what that border needs.

And finally:

My husbands trailing violas, and one sneaked in geranium, in his homemade pot holder, an idea he first spotted on a cottage in Cornwall.

Happy Gardening,