And that was the peonies
Monday 14 June
-
Reason #569 that I am not a proper florist: All my peony flowers come on the same day. Save for the Coral Charm which are always engagingly early, the heat has brought all the flowers on fast and everywhere I look, there are fat, opulent balls of whites and pinks.
For 50 weeks of the year, Facebook groups for florists are full of people pleading for advice on how to get the blasted things to open faster in time for a wedding. (Bang them on a table, hold them upside down in hot water, lock them in a car in direct sun.) The first two weeks of June, it is how to hold them back. Peonies, like all the most beautiful and precious things in life, do their own thing in their own time; they resist holding and the only thing to do is to bask in their glory in the moment.
Tuesday 15 June
-
I have suffered with aphids this year. The suffering has primarily been the sitting on my hands to prevent myself from doing anything about them, assured as I am that they are an important part of the food chain and all I have to do is wait for their predators to arrive. A cloud of what I hope are parasitic wasps hang around the apple tree in the Kitchen Garden. I say I hope, because the apple trees are looking very sickly indeed. All twisted leaves and sticky residue. It has been all I can do to refrain from scrubbing them down with fairy liquid. In the field, it is far more dramatic. A flock of blue tits, swooping across the tops of the flowers. Pausing briefly to perch on the sweet pea tunnel, and then sweeping on again.
Wednesday 16 June
-
A hot day. The early sweet peas are coming as fast as I can cut them. If I could give you one piece of advice for life, it would be to plant a sweet pea vine directly outside your window. If you have a flower bed there, all to the good, but get a container if you need to. Make it bigger than you think; a trough rather than a pot. I spend the day wondered what the glorious smell is in the kitchen. It is as if someone wearing very beautiful, expensive perfume has just walked out the door. It is Windsor of course. Chocolate in appearance and as sweetly scented as you would expect.
Thursday 17 June
-
If last week was all about peonies, this week is all about poppies. The corn poppies came early but now the opium poppies, Papaver somniferum, have joined them. They are one of the easiest seeds to harvest and so I leave them to self-sow all around the field. The result is not only fat pops of colour everywhere I look but a low thrum of bees. First thing in the morning, I find them sleeping within the flowers. Later in the day, the noise of their industry fills the air. Generations of crossing mean that most of my poppies are an unapologetic red, with the odd lilac for variety. I leave them standing, not only for the colour and for the bees, but for the harvest of seeds. Also known as the breadseed poppy, this is the best one for eating. The name indicates one should put it in bread but I am, decadently, going to suggest you eat cake.
Friday 18 June
-
More marigolds planted out in the Dyeing Garden, and a few more seeds sprinkled in. My neighbours, who water religiously every day with a big sprinkler finally catch me pouring a few watering cans over the Kitchen Garden after I have sown drills of kohlrabi and leeks, Fordhook Giant chard and a row of beetroot. (After the solstice for Florence fennel by the way. I adore it but it is a nightmare to grow to bulb. Late sowing is apparently the key.) They look surprised. We assumed you had some clever, underground irrigation system, they say. Pipes or something... No, I say. I water deep once and then they're on their own. You don't get proper deep roots otherwise. Expressions flicker across their faces. I can tell that they don't know whether I'm a horticultural genius or I need reporting to someone for brutality.
Saturday 19 June
-
As if to prove a point, a gentle rain. I retreat from hoeing and start recording my podcast. The rose around the studio window is in full bloom although the clematis that looks like rabbits' ears (Clematis Fusca, because I know someone will ask) is less abundant this year. I think it has exhausted the compost in its pot.
Or maybe I didn't water it enough...
Sunday 20 June
-
Rain. Should it rain like this in June? All the flowers are upside down and taking the hounds out to the orchard for their morning pigeon hunt is a little like a car wash. And not a 1970's disco sort of way, just in a very English garden wet way. It may be June but I am googling tweed. I am tempted by a cape and new, non-leaking wellingtons.