Midsummer

Another post about the garden! I'm afraid I'm more than a little obsessed by it just now; wandering about amongst the flower beds I find myself feverishly making mental notes: no lupins next year am fed up with feeding slugs and snails, must stake earlier, need to get more verbascums and must plant peonies...

I'm quite an organised person, but as a gardener I am truly haphazard. Although I did pull it together to get a few home grown seedlings in the garden this year, I totally forgot about the "plan" - like sticking to complementary colours and really thinking about the positioning of plants. As a result some of the combinations in the garden are slightly too zingy for me or just plain odd! But at least I'm learning as I go along and hopefully I'm making less rookie mistakes.
And even the perfectionist in me gains a little pleasure from looking at the garden and thinking back to how it was when we first bought the cottage nearly two years ago.

Here's one of the first photos I took of the garden before we'd even moved in! And below are the photos of the raised flower beds that we now have on either side of the little patio area. So we've definitely come a long way!

There are two furry individuals who are not the slightest bit worried about gardening colour schemes and planting times. This pair are just happy to be out in the garden with me; playing Russian roulette with the bees, chasing sticks (I have tried telling Holly that she is not a dog!) and occasionally falling asleep amongst the flowers. And after all that hard graft, there's a cosy spot on the day bed to fall asleep on (when I'm not looking!)
I'm sure if these two could talk they would tell me to stop obsessing and just enjoy the bees and the sticks!