Growing in my garden
My home garden is small, 50 foot to be exact, divided into three terraces, and over 75% of it is devoted to flowers and shrubs for cutting. I knew right from the start of tending this garden with its terraces and incline that a large part of it would be devoted to flowers for cutting. It is south facing and the top terrace recieves a great deal of the precious sunshine which is so essential for the beautiful Sunflowers, Cosmos and the bright and cheerful annuals that are so pretty in a summer bouquet. The garden is bordered on all sides a by a six foot high wooden fence that I have clothed with climbing shrubs. It is surprising how many shrubs a fence like this can accommodate, and with a bit of thought and research it is possible to have something in flower all year round. The shrubs which grow against my fences are used throughout the year to add interest and texture, they are especially useful as foliage and in late winter and spring time I can pick and force stems from them to add to my late winter and early spring bouquets. Shrubs like the Flowering Currant, which grows so happily against my fence in the spring as the days lengthen and the sun gets stronger. Flowering Currant is a tough shrub easy to propagate and provides a bright show of colour in the springtime when it is most needed. I have a lot of late winter and early spring flowering shrubs in this garden. They provide colour and a hope for the future at a time of the year when the world can look very drab and dreary, in addition a lot of them have a beautiful perfume and when I am walking around the garden, just to catch a trace of perfume on the air is wonderful. All three terraces have a considerable number of containers which are planted with all manner of different hardy perennials and hardy annuals that I can cut from, from late spring through till September and as the winter flowering shrubs display comes to a finish so starts the seed sowing of the hardy annuals for the summer display.
In my next page I will talk about garden 2, which has increased my growing space, giving me the chance to grow an even wider variety of flowers.
Seeds and Seams 