Green Girl Gardener

I had some sad news on Friday night, so my head wasn’t in the game yesterday to write a post, but I had already taken my photos.

My sad news was that my Granny has passed away. She was eighty nine so you might think it wasn’t unexpected, but it was, and it was a real shock. I didn’t sleep much on Friday night, for obvious reasons, and yesterday as I was driving around everything felt really surreal. I think I expected the universe to know that it’s lost someone special and to be different somehow, but everyone else was just going about their business as normal (or as normal as current circumstances allow) and it felt weird. But maybe it knows something that I don’t, because it hasn’t really lost her, has it? She may have joined my Grandad in whatever’s next, but she will continue to impact our world through my mum, through my aunt, through my cousins, and through me. So I decided I would write today because this little blog is my small way of having an impact on life.

I’m going to stick by the six points rule, but I’m going to deviate from the content rules and make my first point, my Granny.

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I found the photo on the left this morning taken at my wedding in 2008, and I couldn’t work out why Granny and Grandad are both looking away from the camera …. then I found the second photo. Clearly they were being snapped from two different angles! My Grandad was a gardener and Granny kept up with his garden after he left us and I did a Six on Saturday a couple of years ago about their garden. Feel free to have a look here.

Heading back to preset and my garden, and if you have just read Granny’s Six, you’ll see why this point leads on from that, my clematis Montana is starting to grow again.

It never does very well and in fact, I’ve had it three or four years and it had its very first flower last year. I was planning to try to find somewhere better for it this year, but I watched Gardeners’ World today and Monty said climbers really dislike being moved, so maybe I should reconsider.

All my remaining points are flowers! Finally, buds are starting to bloom and give me some colour. I need it now to remind me that life can be, and will be again, cheerful. First up is a single solitary grape hyacinth.

I did plant quite a few of these, and I was told that they multiply with gay abandon, but they don’t seem to do very well in my garden. I passed a garden down the road earlier this week and it was bursting full of grape hyacinths so unlikely to be the soil type. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a few more yet.

Next is my Prunus Kojo-No-Ma which arrived from QVC recently. The buds are starting to open and the flowers are so delicate and beautiful. They’re all facing down so far so I had to twist myself into all sorts of odd angles to get this photo.

Next is present from the birds probably. I think it’s a cowslip going by the look of the leaves, but the flowers aren’t the usual bright yellow, they’ve got these gorgeous orange edges. It’s growing in a strange place where it could easily get trampled, so I’ll move it soon.

Finally I’m going to finish with the cheeriest bloom (so far) in the garden. My camellia is in the front garden and it’s had buds since before Christmas but the first one only opened this week. I have to keep remembering to look at it out of the window. In previous years I’ve spent a couple of minutes every morning looking at it when I’ve left for work, but I’m still working from home and I don’t want to miss it because once the flowers bloom they fade disappointingly quickly.

So there we go, my little stamp on the world for another week that would never have happened if it wasn’t for the very special, strong, stoic lady at the top of this post. I’ll try my hardest to continue your legacy in the best ways that I can.