TINY TUESDAY

First of all, I must apologise for not responding to your lovely comments on yesterday’s Blip and nor did I do any commenting.  As I mentioned, I had a sore throat and headache and unfortunately, the headache persisted all day and into the evening, so at 7.30 p.m. I decided that I needed to take some paracetamol and go to bed, which I did.  I am one of those fortunate people who can “sleep off” feeling poorly, and I was able to do that by sleeping the clock round - I didn’t wake up until gone 8.a.m. this morning and felt much better.

After we had worked in the garden yesterday morning, Mr. HCB had suggested that we go over to Brinkworth Walled Garden Nursery this morning, so I was looking forward to that, but knew that if I didn’t feel any better, we wouldn’t be going.  However, after my good, long sleep, I was sure that a morning wandering around this beautiful little nursery would do me the world of good.

Although it is small, there is plenty of room to be physically distanced from others, but when we arrived, there was only one other couple there, and by the time we had chosen some plants, they had gone, so we were then able to have a chat with Fraser and his Mum.  As I have said before, they are so knowledgeable about plants in general and all the plants in their nursery, so it’s almost like having your own gardening encyclopaedia when you are there!  

We explained that we were having a new fence around our garden, and would be coming back to get more plants once that was done.  Fraser said that they would be having a delivery of clematis and other plants in the middle of August, so we said we would be over after that.  Having purchased several plants, including Scabious, Monarda, Heuchera,  Companula and Thalictrum, I then asked if they had any Guernsey Cream clematis coming in, because it happened to be Mr. HCB’s favourite and we had lost ours a few years back.  Fraser’s Mum wandered off and came back with one and said that they would keep it for us until our next visit - but we decided to buy it there and then - so we now have lots of plants to go into our garden and they will be planted after the next rain has fallen.

One of the plants we bought the last time we visited the nursery is a scabious, Scabiosa Kudo, which is a new variety from Japan that flowers from May until November, so as we liked it so much we bought another one today. Having placed them on the garden to see the effect, we noticed that the butterflies were already landing on the flowers, so we were really happy to see that.

The bee, which is my Blip for today, was on one of the scabious plants in the nursery, so we are hoping that  by having two of them, we will encourage many more bees and butterflies.

I have also made a collage, which I have put in as an extra, of some of the other beautiful flowers all around the nursery - the beauty of going there is that all the flowers can be seen as if they were in a garden, not just in pots - and as I said, Fraser and his Mum are always very helpful and knowledgeable about their plants.  I also spotted a little frog jumping in one of the flowers, so had to take a shot of that too.

“The flower doesn’t dream of the bee;
     it blossoms and the bee comes.”
Mark Nepo