Simply..back down to the good earth....

..after my fantasies of a fashionable life in yesterday's post. (Well, I do enjoy a taste of it now and then!)

We've had a spell of good gardening weather and came back from Yorkshire with a boot full of plants from Vertigro, a favourite nursery near York. Bedding mainly, bought small and potted on, they will stay in the greenhouse for a few weeks, cossetted with fleece on cold nights...I know I should nip off these early flowers for bushier plants and more flowers later, but the smell of the heliotrope is heavenly.

I will cut the heliotrope flowers for little vases in the bedroom - that way I get the perfume and the bushy plants. I am planning to put them in the big black pots with fuchsia 'Genii' but it does take a good warm summer for them to do well outside here...The argyranthemum are red (I thought I was buying white) and covered in buds. I have three so will pinch out one and get a succession that way. The bidens will get a good trim too and the flowers will make a little vase-full. The coriander, dill and fennel are for the leaves of course, but also for the flowers when they go to seed later in the summer.

There are also baby lettuce, diascia, bacopa, petunia, pink campion, poppies, and my friend's sunflowers in there.

I love the greenhouse at this time of year.

It is full of hope.