Wild Abandon

Just arrived

Looking for sunshine

 The 'party favours' on the tables at our daughter & son-in-law's wedding were packets of wild flower seeds from West Sussex.   At the end of the evening there were several packets left behind and I was keen to gather them all up to scatter in the garden.


Who knows what happened - I only ended up with 2!  However plenty of people took some home and they are being spread over fields and flowerbeds across the land - some even got as far as Ireland.  I haven't heard how any of them are doing yet.


Once I had recovered from the amazing week of wedding preparation & celebration I sprinkled one pack of the seeds over the soil in a prepared flower pot.  The second packet I just sprinkled over a pretty ropey old flower bed.


3 weeks later seedlings in the pot are doing well.  With the flowerbed it's hard to detect what's a flower and what's a weed seedling at the moment.  Wild flowers don't need rich, moist conditions, in fact, I've read that they prefer rough conditions.  Well, the cosy flower potted seeds have germinated and are doing well and I may have to use them as my identification guide for anything that surfaces in the flower bed. I'm hoping both sites produce lots of flowers and that they self seed this autumn.  

The 'before' of the veg patch

We're going to build a vegetable garden at the top of the garden, basically all the shrubs you see in the mid-foreground of this photo. As it's on a hill we want to create level ground so the approach will have a bank which I want to be full of wild flowers. Introducing them into the garden now could mean they get there of their own accord.  


I'm also intending to have a wall of roses and an arched gateway into the vegetable garden.  I have a beautiful, tall yellow rose with an old fashioned scent that grows infront of the garage.  I would love to have a wall of these roses at the entrance to the vegetable garden so am trying to propigate them.

Can you see the red buds?  They're there!

My advisor - my 76yr old mum - says to dip them in hormone rooting powder and then stick them in the ground.  That what she does and her roses thrive.  She also sits next to the rose 'nursery' smoking and I reckon the lack of clean air kicks their survival mechanism into full gear and they grow like crazy to cope!


Mine are doing okay - if you look carefully you can see little red buds starting to emerge.  I have a little chat with them on a daily basis - I reckon roses are quite sensitive, fragile spirits who need lots of reassurance and then cope brilliantly in difficult situations.  The summer so far should provide them with plenty of opportunity to overcome adversity!

Smell this.