Plants, flowers and shrubs; Share your photos here

Beautiful array of lovely colour there Tony, great for pollinators too, your hard work has paid dividends!

To prove your point Wendy,

Tony T said:

After the flowers finish do you collect the seed pods to make garlic capers?

We actually bought a few Wild Garlic plants a few years ago at a country house garden where they have woodland filled with the plants. It’s only been over the last two years that the plants have been thriving in our garden, so at the moment I only use the leaves for salads and let the rest of the plants do what they need to do to keep going for the time being. Perhaps if they establish themselves more and start spreading out a bit I’ll use more of the plants in the future.

Common Spotted Orchid

I probably knew what this small flower was last year ... and then forgot again!

Ox-eye daisies

And with a visitor - one of the 4 yellow sawflies that are practically indistinguishable (Tenthredo sp.)

And I finally spotted the virus. I have to say that it was a lot bigger than I expected.

Ok it was really the seed head of something but doing a fine impersonation, I thought.

Had never thought about trying to buy and grow Wild Garlic Paul, is your growing in a shady area and is your soil light or heavy/clay type. I'm wondering whether we might have a suitable shady area but our soil is quite heavy.

I have a small clump of wild garlic coming back every year & spreading slowly but my soil is chalky/sandy, always sprinkle seed back on the ground! Have you thought of growing it in a large pot or trough Tony, might be easier to support it that way, always flops over!

Tony T said:

Had never thought about trying to buy and grow Wild Garlic Paul, is your growing in a shady area and is your soil light or heavy/clay type. I'm wondering whether we might have a suitable shady area but our soil is quite heavy.

When we moved into our house, Tony, we had to cut down a few trees which were just too close to the house for comfort, so I used  a few of the old logs which were lying around and not yet split up for the log burner at the bottom of the garden. The logs were now a few years old and pretty dried out. I also used a few stones left over from the pond build to make a wee feature of it. Mrs A has also added some driftwood around it over the past few years.

We filled it in with cheap garden centre compost.

The feature is underneath an ornamental Willow tree in the garden, but it also gets direct light from the southwest. If I remember correctly, we tried a few different plants here, and initially only the Chives seemed to like it there.

We bought the Wild Garlic on a whim one day (it was bought as a bunch of full plants with bulbs and leaves intact, but wrapped in damp newspaper and not already potted into soil).

On the way home I thought I’d give it a try under the tree because there was a space where other stuff had failed. I think it was the next again year before it took off, after dying back not long after planting.

As you know, it has really nice flowers, and to me, it smells lovely as you pass it by in the growing season. We do water it as it’s only a small area and dries out quite quickly under the tree, but we don’t feed it in any way.

The apprentice gardener insisted on becoming involved here, if only to give a sense of scale. :-)

You can see here that I chopped my Chives back yesterday. They shoud come again and reflower before the season is over.

It's good timing actually as some of my Spring Onions are now ready to pick, so I can substitute them for the Chives in my salads until the Chives come back again. :-)

Looking roughly northwest.

The overhang of the tree is in line with the edge of the path.

The area is slightly sheltered as you can see, but it is still fullly open on the southwest (ish) side.

I do like to dabble with things that you can eat,  but Mrs A is the real gardener in the house. :-)

Stunning updates everyone,  

@ Paul,   your photos of the beautiful log area reminded me of our old stumpery and of the other day when I visited a garden centre to try get ideas for the new large balcony area;    not sure I will grow vegetables but what do you think about maybe this idea with butyl lined wooden base plant type boxes filled with bark chippings or stones and a water feature added !  ?   Still early days for the work as there are plenty more urgent jobs to do first but I like the idea of having a natural log area similar to what you have done there Paul.     I would like to incorporate planted ferns, maybe wild garlic or herbs !  and have a mini stumpery area if it is possible here.  

the ideas going round the cogs in my brain are maybe start with a raised wooden platform like smaller version of this ........    camouflage the edges with pots of pollinating plants ....  but making it more stumpery/logs/rocks rather than like than the alpines shown here.

incorporate a water feature  - I like this one  ..........     it's not quite as big as it looks on this photo !!    We have double outside power socket.

and make the area look a bit more like this ............. but raised slightly off the ground like in the first pic.

probably too ambitious but I have plenty of time to think of ideas      lol         might be next year before we get round to the balcony as lots of other things will have more priority.   Always nice to start with a blank canvas and think outside the box    !!   lol  

Its an idea Wendy but we have enough pots to water I think and as I said to Paul, I'm so busy currently trying to replace rotten wooden arches/obelisks & fencing as its all over 20yrs old now and if were not careful we could be crushed by our pergola which has a lean of 30% from upright with 3 of the 4 posts almost rotted away at the bottom. If I don't post anymore you'll know what happened ha ha