This week's pickings from the cutting patch

I'm loving greys and pinks at the moment. Here there is a mixture of japanese anemone,  artemesia, echinacea, annual scabious and poppy seedheads. The pincushion flowers, (much nicer than the official 'scabious' name!), have long been a favourite because they are gorgeous enough to swoon over from bud to full flower whilst being fantastically prolific and long stemmed. Artemesias have been a real discovery this year - there are many forms that provide the most elegant silvery foliage for the whole growing season.

I realise I have been rather scant with the flower news and photos this summer, so whilst there are still pretty flowers in the garden, I will try and post a weekly photo of what I am picking and loving most. I don't sell many now, the jewellery has become my full time business, but I am still growing a garden full of loveliness for my own enjoyment, still with an emphasis on plants that look fabulous in the garden and the vase with the least amount of faffage. If you live locally and would like to buy a bunch now and again I am still very happy to provide for that.

I'd love to know what you are growing and picking in your garden whether for the vase or the plate?

Let's play catch up 2: the garden

What a gorgeous summery week we have had, the garden is in full June flounce and I'm loving the giddy first flush of summer herbaceous abundance. The delphiniums have come back better than ever, I do love them. Dark Knight and Summer Skies are two of my favourite varieties.

I am finally learning the importance of some good vertical lines in a border and now that the alliums are over, it is the grasses, giant nepeta, delphs and lupins that are doing it best at the moment. Love me some floral spires! Poppies and cornflowers are heading skyward too.

Wishing you a lovely June weekend, what a cracking time of year. xx

White tulips

I am revelling in my white tulips this Spring. Tulipa Spring Green was originally planted three years ago and is still going great guns, despite the fact I never lift them over the winter. I suppose if any thing has changed about them it is that the colour seems a little creamier this year, less white. Still gorgeous though and they last well in the vase.

The other, Tulipa Smirnoff has been a fantastic discovery. A kind neighbour gave me some bulbs in January and I was doubtful if they would flower properly being planted so late. Just a couple of months later they were rocketing through the surface of the soil and I just cannot believe how gorgeous they are.

The following pictures were taken after over a week in a vase - I will be growing loads of these next year! The jaggedy edges, like so many little frost spikes, just make me go weak at the knees.

There is something so lovely about the shape of tulip flowers, I am wondering if I could use a similar shape in my jewellery somehow....

Anyway, have a brilliant weekend wherever you are, get your mitts on some locally grown narcissi or tulips if you can, you won't be sorry! xxx

Wild Acre flowers are in the garden!

It is that time of year when I first get to play with  flowers again. I have a few customers that love to order Wild Acre flowers for Mothers' Day even though I can't pick enough from my garden yet, so I buy some Dutch ones in as a one-off exception to my normal rules about only using flowers from my garden. It was so lovely to create the bouquets and have my hands smell of flowers again! Here are some pictures of the sort of ones that went out this weekend - full of seasonal flowers like tulips plus some dogwood stems and other greenery that I did manage to forage from the garden. I went for two very different colour ways - cream, apricot and tangerine and a deep purple and green combo.

A pretty zingy combination it was! I hope the mamas are happy!

Happily, the weekend has been a beautiful, mild and sunshiny one, and right on cue the garden has burst into life, (as if miffed that I should think of buying in my blooms!). Swathes of scented narcissi have opened their creamy faces to the sun, plus cowslips and anemones - really exciting and it means I can offer home grown Wild Acre bouquets and posies again.

 I am particularly excited about a tulip I have been trialling in the greenhouse, isn't it exquisite? I will be planting plenty later this year to offer next Spring.

If you are local enough to collect, just email me if you are interested in some scented narcissi and pretty garden foliage bouquets, and soon there will be tulips and anemones and other loveliness available - the Wild Acre facebook page is a really good place to keep up to date with all the news or pop to my website at www.wildacredesigns.co.uk and sign up for the newsletter to stay in touch with what is going on with the flowers and jewellery. I am also on Twitter (@B_wildacre) and Instagram (Belinda@wildacre), and I'm pretty regularly posting pictures of both my new jewellery designs and also available flowers there. I'd love to connect with you.

Have a wonderful week. xxx

an unbeatable floral duo for January: hellebores and snowdrops

Just when it seems the garden will sleep on forever, the unbeatable, unbreakable duo of hellebores and snowdrops pop up in my woodland garden. They are so faithful, so tough, so beautiful. My go-to plants for January floral therapy!

The only help they need is a little dividing and replanting for the snowdrops every five years or so and a chopping back of the huge amount of hellebore leaves in December, so the new shoots can emerge all gorgeous and Venus-like, unhidden by an unruly mop of old leaves. Anyway, that is what has worked for me.

Have you got any January wonder going on in your garden, would love to know? xx

hanging on to colour

These final garden flowers are still looking so pretty in our sitting room. Not bad at all for mid november, but frosty nights mean they are the very last. Sniff.

However, nature was still looking pretty vibrant down by the river today.

Which was good because I am not quite ready for the slip into monochrome quite yet.

Have a cosy weekend. xxxx

last flowers standing

The very, very last flowers left standing: cosmos, dahlias, astrantia (third flush!!), cotinus foliage and a teeny aster. That is it, finito, adios, all over for another year. This last bunch goes to Jane's flower party, no better place.  It may not be much but it is all I have! 

fairies at the bottom of the garden

The landscape around our home is distinctly autumnal now that the last of the hay bales have been hoofed off by the tractors,

and the land has been ploughed and hoed, looking all neat and tucked in at the sides. Happily, temperatures are still warm enough to leave a coat behind and summer seems to be hanging on in unlikely sunshiny afternoons and southerly breezes. In our garden there are the telltale signs of the season, (I always wait for the spindleberry trees to turn their gorgeous reds and pinks),

but in other places it still looks like late summer to me.

What has changed is the feel of the garden, I can't quite put my finger on it, I'm not sure if it is the soft slant of the light, the carpet of little acorns and first fallen leaves underfoot or the changing colour palette but most likely it is the fact that by now I let the garden go a bit (actually, a lot!), and as you can see a 'naturalistic planting scheme' becomes properly naturalistic!
 

Plants at the end of their season start tilting and wrapping themselves around eachother for support, final bursts of flower mix in with the beginnings of decay, everything looks a bit drunken - in happy, slightly muddled disarray. The result is a magical, fairy tale quality that I don't feel so much at any other time of year. If ever there were fairies at the bottom of the garden it should be right now, playing amongst the little mushrooms that are popping up in the damp woodland earth and dancing in the arching blooms of the last of the roses and anemones. Can you feel it too??

 Hoping you all have a lovely week, with a whiff of the fairytale now and again!