Did you know today was World Saunter Day? (Thank you Cornflower!) Not the kind of walking to make me fitter I know, but I do quite a lot of it, so I thought I'd show some recent photographs of Things Seen While Sauntering -
 

I've been using Zoe Harcombe's books for a couple of years now - she advocates real food and plenty of it. I was amazed and delighted to discover myself losing those extra few pounds while eating more than I used to eat!

She has brought out a 30 day programme for July and I've signed up as I want to feel fitter, less sluggish, and to be rid of these annoying sugar cravings which still plague me.

Check it out here and see if you feel like joining me....

I am off to a lovely family wedding, and leave you with a gorgeous plant combination that came about quite by chance.

I love the way the pollen of the poppy is the same colour as the leaves of the acer, and the markings inside the petals is a darker shade of the same.

The poppy was grown from a seed mix called Pizzicato (Thomson and Morgan).

Here are some blogs I am currently enjoying -
www.marciescudderphotography.com   www.lucentimagery.com  and there is some good advice on Leo Babatua's post today at www.zenhabits.net
Have a happy weekend

Can there be such a thing as the 'wrong' colour?

Rosemary mentioned in the comments on this post using colours she had loved in Norway on her English house but finding they did not look right, and I recently read about someone living in Georgia trying to use soft 'English 'greens in her garden but finding that with the red clay soil and a lot of red dust in the air this didn't work either. (It reminds me of bringing souvenirs you love home from foreign holidays and realising you don't love them here!)

We gardened in Cyprus for a few years and found that the gentle, subtle Northern colours I favoured were so insignificant looking in the strong light as to be almost invisible. I think that municipal planting in some Scottish towns often mistake 'bright' for 'light' and can look garish in the extreme (colours which would have worked in Cyprus..). I also think that blue on buildings very rarely works in Britain, except perhaps soft blues in Suffolk or by the sea in the south of England, or muted blues by Farrow and Ball, but the kind of blues you see which thrill you in Greece look horribly wrong here to my eyes.

So I do think there is such a thing as the wrong colour.

It's a fascinating subject, don't you think?

Colour, in painting and in the garden is my favourite subject, so more soon....

See new Coronation Wood post..top right....

Swedish Houses were built here about 1950. Some wooden 'kit' houses were gifted to Britain after the war by the Swedish Government and more were subsequently purchased from Sweden and used to house forestry workers around the country as there was an acute housing shortage and reforestation on a huge scale was underway. There are Swedish Houses Ardentinny, Swedish Houses Arrochar, Swedish Houses Glenbranter....many locations and usually just 12 or so houses in each existing village.

Unemployed men from Glasgow came here seeking work. They and their wives were delighted with the wonderful family houses with three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, wash house and coal house (now my studio), a Rayburn and a garden. The field between our house and the loch was a tree nursery.

Lots of large families grew up here and at our recent reunion of children from the village school (see Coronation Wood posts) lots of stories were told of the fun and adventures that were had. One man recalled the boys daring each other to swing from the rafters of Swedish Houses as they were being built.


The garden of Robert Dash whom I mentioned in yesterday's post can be seen in some short videos here.

This is the gate in the back garden. I first saw the use of primary colours in the garden of Robert Dash, an American artist. It was in an article by the late Rosemary Verey in Gardens Illustrated which I think was then quite a new magazine. The image of some painted wooden structures in his garden stayed in my mind for many years.

When we came to live in Swedish Houses  (which are black stained wooden houses which were sent to this country from Sweden after the second world war) the idea of using red for a gate came to me as I was looking out of the back window one day.

The houses have primary colours on their doors - ours is yellow - and I had admired the use of bright colours in housing in Sweden when I was studying landscape design there, especially in the work of architect Ralph Erskine. So it seemed appropriate, and I have to say I have loved it, and so have many people who have bought the cards I've produced of it.

So a yellow gate in the front garden was only a matter of time really..

With white bark birch, betula jacquemontii, white foxgloves, golden acer, white lupins....I'm having a lovely time tweaking the planting around it. I'm planning to collect seed from a fine american buttercup elsewhere in the garden to plant a mass of it next year just in front of the gate.

It is great weather for producing our own power. We had solar panels fitted almost a year ago (see here).
We used the washing machine and the electric lawnmower at the same time in this hot sunny weather - for free.

Quite expensive to install (though much cheaper now than just a few years ago) we consider it money well spent. The same money in the bank would earn next to nothing at present. On the roof it brings us about £500 per year, and reduces both our electricity bill and our carbon footprint, and will be recyclable at the end of its useful life, about 25 years hence.

It just feels like a good thing to do.
 
And watching the electricity meter going in reverse is a very nice sight!