Tangled Flowers Earlswood

An area of extreme tangle… there’s a path in there somewhere! This is one of the areas that feels like it should feel at the summer solstice today. I can’t quite believe we’re at this point in the year when the season we’ve had means most annuals are so far behind.

Yet more reinforcement of how crucial resilient planting is. This wet mild endless spring and the droughts of previous years have really shown what thrives in this particular garden. Perennials, roses, biennials and direct-seeded (slug resistant) hardy annuals like this Nigella are where it’s at here. I think I’m ready to forgo dahlias forever after this year’s slug-ravaged, gall-ridden, slow growing disappointment!

We’re nearing the end of the wisteria blossoms. It still smells amazing under here, but it’s also covered in an ever-renewing dressing of confetti. The brush lives on the table at the moment.

We were so lucky to inherit this mature plant with the house. The structure you see is less than five years old and I’m so pleased with how quickly we’ve been able to train the vines over it. I wouldn’t be without it, but it is a monster, and a lot of work. The February prunes is one of my favourite jobs, but keeping it in check during the growing season feels like going into battle with a very leafy brute. I always put it off and then much sweating and swearing ensues. Totally worth it for these magic few weeks, and its cool summer shade. I think.

AVAILABILITY UPDATE
The run of sunny days earlier this week has brought some flowers out, but I’m still nowhere near where I’d hoped to be at this point in the season. I’ve been considering how I’m relating to the garden, the cutting areas vs the family areas, and selling flowers. Right now, at a point in my life when I really need to lean on the garden (is there ever a time I don’t?), I’m feeling stuck, burdened, pressured by it. It’s sapping my confidence and challenging my already fluctuating capacity.

It’s a small space relative to a flower field; it just can’t supply a wide range of stems consistently and I need to find a way to be ok with that. I’ve decided that for now, I’m not going to offer bouquets this year. Small buckets here and there, of special garden stems and the odd glut of fillers, will still be possible for my event florist friends.

This feed will become more just about sharing a home garden and homegrown arrangements for the house. I’m hoping to get the love back and embrace my inner plant geek again.

See pic 4 for an example of how disheartening this spring has been: I thought my overwintered dahlias were taking their time to get growing so I dug them to look. Turns out they’ve been working overtime serving up new shoots to the slug buffet, despite TWO nematode treatments. It’s representative of the toll they’ve had on other young plants so the greenhouse has some rather large seedlings in it that I’m scared to plant out. Gah.

Much happy wild plant-spotting on an Earlswood walk this morning 💚

1. White campion
2. Crab apple blossom
3. Secret bluebells (the majority fenced off which is great- will keep them safe)
4. Red campion
5. Baby oak foliage
6. Help ? Something sagey I think…
7. Special little patch of wood anemones
8. Hawthorn

Still waiting for the garden to catch up 🙄

Attempting to break dormancy today so here are some January joys.

I’m experiencing a prolonged recovery from a bout of covid at the end of November, so our normal neurodivergent chaos at home has been greater, and I’ve been feeling more stuck than usual, even for January. Days like this provide a much-needed injection of hope for the season ahead!

Nearing the end of the very longest month of the year, the sun is strong enough that my garden cuppa spot is quite warm by late morning. Warm enough for cat sunbathing, if not human.

I’m not actually sowing seeds yet other than cobaea, but I need to do SOMETHING, so I’m writing my diy labels (less plastic packaging would be nice, but while it exists I’ll cut it up for labels!).

This also means the hens are getting a longer scratch about: a fox killed two of their flock mates a couple of months ago, so I daren’t go indoors when they’re out of the safety of the run anymore.

The wildlife is reappearing: definitely more birdsong this week as they get ready for breeding season. Plenty of ivy berries for them this spring after the sunny spell during flowering in September/October. There are bees about as well enjoying the fragrant winter-flowering shrubs.

It’s a good day.

The only tulips in the cutting patch.

The last couple of years I’ve planted hundreds of tulips in trenches, then in spring I’ve stressed about when they will flower and how I will harvest, process and sell them all. This year I missed the first flush of ranunculus because I had tulips I needed to shift. They are pulled up bulb and all and I end up selling them well below their true value for the time and stress and upfront cost that goes into growing them. To make a profit at all for my causes, I bought from suppliers I didn’t feel totally comfortable with because they were the cheapest. I’m not convinced that there’s a huge ecological difference between shipping in bulbs to grow as a one-off flower in my patch and customers just buying the imported flowers from the supermarket (not that I grew supermarket varieties, but still!).

So I’m done. Today I’ve planted just 30 tulip bulbs in the cutting patch. They’re a tall variety so I’m hoping I’ll get another year out of them. I’ve delved deep into the wonders of the ‘miscellaneous bulbs’ section of my favourite supplier for hundreds of other bulbs that will bring beauty and interest for my florists and my own arrangements, and should be far more sustainable than the tulips.

I’ve also planted hundreds of fairly perennial tulips in my borders because I love to see them in the garden and they’ll give me joy for years if I don’t pick them!

Ranunculus next.

It’s been a special autumn equinox ❤️ The stream of blue T-shirts behind these gorgeous rosehips is a community gathering to remember our dear friend along her favourite Earlswood paths.

K arranged the weather ☀️ but huge thanks to for organising such a lovely event.

Perennial propagation bench

I’ve realised this year, with playful/sleepy young cats taking over my kitchen windowsills, that I need seedlings to be very nearby. These (and another shelving unit of babies) are just outside the back door. Any further and they are out of sight, out of mind… out of watering, feeding, potting on and being protected from snails.

I don’t think I’ve ever kept so many seedlings alive without planting them out before! Annuals are generally pretty quick to go in the ground (or settle into their winter go-slow and need less care), which suits my attention span. Perennials are a longer term project, so I’m chuffed that I’ve got this far. SO close to getting them in the ground and handing over to Mother Nature’s superior parenting.

These plants will form the backbone of next year’s flowers. There will still be annuals, but if they fail due to crazy weather, these stalwarts will still give me flowers. Every year. With less compost, water, energy. That’s the plan anyway.

If you’re interested in perennials for cutting, I can’t recommend Rachel Siegfried’s () book highly enough.

The patch is looking distinctly end of season. With my failure of spring sowings I was banking on the dahlias for September flowers, but the wet summer was slug heaven and they’re only just recovering and beginning to flower. If they develop a head of steam before the frosts I will post offering flowers again, but for now I’ve decided to close to orders.

Lots of autumn jobs to focus my energy on: the new perennial bed mostly exists in the form of young plants from seed that now need planting out. To do that I need to move the mint to a big veg trug near the house and clear the grasses and Orach (which in turn can’t happen until I’ve harvested some precious seed for next year). That shed desperately needs a lick of paint. And of course I need to start again with my autumn sowing of hardy annuals because they’ve appreciated this late heatwave as much as I have 🥵😂

My spring flower offering next year will be different to previous years. More on that soon, but with the prep I’ve been doing this season I’m excited about the beauty to come ✨

It’s Lammas today, the first harvest festival. Nicely demonstrated by my back railway fence: a gorgeous mix of plump brambles (mostly picked by the time I took this pic!), tight red berries yet to ripen, and flowers promising still more.

One of the things I like about the pagan calendar is the way it celebrates these in-between seasons. Not as much as some cultures do, where micro-seasons can last just a few days, but better than the clunky way of dividing the year into four by calendar month. Right now, as the days grow gradually shorter from their midsummer peak, summer crops are shifting from growth to ripening.

Even in a typical, less rainy summer, the fierceness is beginning to ebb. In a few weeks it will soon be time to start sowing cool season annuals for flowering late next spring. For now, it’s time to sit back and enjoy this season’s bounty.

£1005

That’s the year’s donations so far 💚

As promised I’ve finally done some admin ahead of my summer break and have made three £250 donations. Combined with the £255 spring bulb sales which went to earlier this year that makes for a record breaking total for me. And there’s still the autumn season to come! Thank you so, so much to everyone who supports this little project by buying flowers. I’ll be back in mid-September for you to do so again 😉

Give my fabulous causes a follow:

Final pick

I’m taking the summer off to loaf about with the kids, partly for a rest but partly for lack of flowers, which I hope will be remedied by the dahlias come September.

I’m putting energy into next season already; sowing seeds for perennials and biennials, planning the planting layout, ordering hardy annual seed to sow next month and considering the bulb order I need to place soon.

There’ll be a celebratory post later this week when I catch up with admin and donations. Despite my shortage of materials it’s been a GOOD season so far!

New girls!

They’re home and I have found names 🙌 I started looking into Waterperry School of Horticulture having rabbit-holed there via alumnus Valerie Finnis (who I thought could donate a good companion hen name to go with Beth Chatto…. anyway!). I discovered the school’s founders, Beatrix Havergal and her life-long partner Avice Sanders.

They met at a school where Beatrix was the gardener and Avice the housekeeper, and were together for the rest of Avice’s life until her death in 1970. There’s not much to be found about Avice, as she ran the housekeeping rather than gardening side of the new school for women they created in 1932, but Beatrix sounds like a force of nature. Her mission was to provide women with a horticultural education to match that available to men.

So, meet Beatrix (the black one; so far a bit noisy and engaging in staring contests with Miss W), and Avice (the white one who seems the very easy going of the pair).

Ms Havergal’s photo (credit Valerie Finnis via RHS Lindley Library) is pic4 and rather backs up the story that her friend Roald Dahl asked Quentin Blake to model the illustration for a certain teacher on her stature and dress…

Pic 5 Miss W trying to assert dominance by prowess on the play equipment 😂

Miss Willmott here is a lonely hen 😞

Sadly we lost Margery last weekend, leaving Miss Willmott the last of the 4 hens we adopted from friends last year. They were all getting on a bit; Gertrude died within a couple of weeks of moving, and a fox got the better of Vita just before flockdown hit.

So tomorrow I’m going to choose two new hens to keep Miss Willmott company in the garden, and provide us with some much-needed eggs (this old girl doesn’t lay anymore). I need to decide what to name them.

The original quartet’s historic lady gardener names (snigger) seemed so fun, but as I look for more of their vintage I find the same breed of privileged victorian-borns who inherited fortunes, connections or big gardens, giving them a leg-up into gardening fame. I guess that’s just how things were then, and it doesn’t diminish my love of the story of the real Miss Willmott, who was clearly as bonkers as me and frittered away her considerable fortune all on buying PLANTS 😂 But it doesn’t sit right.

It may be time to move on to 20th century women who changed our gardening lives. How to choose??!

Reality post.

I’ve been finding things hard (in the garden, and in general) for a while now and I’ve been nudged by Adam’s post this morning to actually articulate it here.

This is my garden right now: overall it doesn’t look awful in the green bits, but you’ll notice a lack of flowers (I’m not counting the hogweed gracing the border in the middle: if I can’t cut it, it doesn’t count!), overgrown lawn, and some heaps of crap. That stylish pile on the patio is all our roof timbers saved from the reno, which will be recycled into something useful… one day. First we have to wade through the piles of crap in the yard, and actually remove the pile of dead rosemary (didn’t survive winter) and wisteria whips (never stops growing) that I left on top of said timbers some months ago.

None of it *should* be insurmountable, but add in my wonky brain (some undetermined flavour of neurodivergent plus anxiety/depression), losing my friend over winter which meant I did sod all for a good while, tidying up after building work, autistic/school anxiety tween, husband’s full-on job and a very emotional 7 year old, and it all starts to feel a bit impossible.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this impossible feeling yet, but know that if you’re finding things hard, you’re not alone.

Wild textural delights for this morning 💚

My helper. She’s a very good girl 💕

Productive afternoon at long last, getting my dahlias in the ground and toms in the greenhouse, courtesy of and her astonishing ability to raise seedlings through a house build!

I’m about 6 weeks behind. There might be flowers and tomatoes come October…

In other garden news, I have a very wobbly chicken. Crossing my fingers she rights herself, but last time this happened we lost the hen 😔

Evening pick. I’m not thrilled that these are slipping from 8ish to 9.30pm due to the hot afternoons and Small’s tricky bedtimes, but I have to say it’s a lovely time to be in the garden. Everything white just glows.

At the very end of the garden (over the railway fence really) is this huge philadelphus mock orange. It was there when we moved in, probably rooted from a dumped clipping, growing in a spindly way through a big old hawthorn. When that succumbed to disease and had to be removed, the philadelphus absolutely went for it and now I’m not entirely sure how to manage it. Gorgeous, but awkward. A bit like Small 😂

Gift posy today 💚

[Sorry- my phone camera is broken and can only take zoomed in photos with blurred backgrounds, which is a bit awkward when I’m trying to hold the thing I’m taking a pic of! Trying to find the resolve to go without my phone for a a bit and get it fixed 😂]

Yesterday’s flowers: a bouquet for a gorgeous lady who has resolved to invest in her own joy. We had a lovely chat and a hug on my doorstep. Honestly, the people I meet doing this work, they’re so wonderful 🥰 🥰🥰

Today is a huge treat for me, a belated birthday present from Mr Tangled, and a bit of a pilgrimage as I’ve not been before. We’re off to 💚 I will no doubt be live spamming my stories and coming home with unnecessary new vases and seeds from the shop 😂

It’s not exaggerating to say that Sarah Raven is the reason I started a cutting garden some years ago. She wrote the OG book on cutting gardens which is an incredibly useful resource (if slanted towards those with more space than I have). The catalogues are pure, joyous, beautiful garden inspo and I still sit down with a cuppa when they drop through the door. There’s always more new things to try… so many you have to start a cut flower enterprise to justify the seed!

Say hello to my visitor to this morning’s bucket! 🐝

June has finally arrived. I know it’s the 12th, but the roses were late this year so it feels like the month has only just turned. I’ve been busier recently than my lack of activity on here would suggest. Flowers for a couple of celebrations, florist picks, and supplying flowers for the desk at has kept things ticking over nicely.

Very grateful for the perennials and self seeders this year because it’s been a challenging spring for gardening what with our build (which is now complete!).

The kitchen looks like a flower shop again this morning because I’m off to this evening to talk sustainable flowers and gardening for cutting. Looking forward to enabling a whole group of people to get brave with their snips!

Evening pick for the lovely This hesperis smells as beautiful as the late light looks, and I can feel my shoulders dropping.

It’s been, quite honestly, a rather crappy week or so, but having to make time to be in the garden is one of the reasons I do this. And the joy of working with folk like Grace! When I see something that makes me think ‘ooooh lovely!’ I’m pretty confident Grace will be pleased to see it in her bucket.

I think it’s probably impossible that if you’re a local who follows this account, you don’t also follow . But just in case! Rachel has written a fab new post introducing what she does.

If you’ve spotted an event going on in Earlswood, it’s more than likely she’s the brains and energy behind it 💚

Right, the tulips are gone! No time to be sad, I must turn my attention to the other blooms fleetingly passing through the patch.

I have fried my late-sown and neglected hardy annual seedlings in the greenhouse, so there will be a switch to perennials from the rest of the garden once these beauties have gone. Delicate allium cowanii and ruffled Italian ranunculus. This variety is named pastello striato: literally striped pastels, and you can see the gorgeous markings over their many petals. They are, admittedly, a bit pinker than I expected, but I’m sure many people like pink more than I do!

This also marks the shift away from straight bunches of plentiful tulips, to mixed arrangements of the pick of the garden on any given day. This means I pick to order so allow a day or two if you can! Get in touch with me for posy jars (£15), hand-tied bunches (£25) and gift bouquets in all manner of sizes.

I seem to have saturated Earlswood‘s demand for tulips! Hit me with suggestions of folk in our community who deserve a treat for what they do for us please. These bunches are looking for homes.

Alternatively, if you’d like to buy them, please do 😂

Delighted to deliver a bunch of gorgeous peony-flowered tulips to Sam and the team at Reigate Natural Health this morning. The clinic is a haven of peace anyway but these look lovely gracing their desk!

Very near the end of the tulips now, and the jammy mix has taken a distinctly blackcurrant flavour with all the Queen of Night flowering at once.

Bunches of these (£8/£15) available to collect from 3pm this afternoon onwards, plus I think one small bunch of doubles (the rest are spoken for already!) £10. There’s already over £200 to send to St Catherine’s: it would be lovely to make that number a bit bigger wouldn’t it?!

Seriously rethinking the tulip plan for next year. I really need to find space for a tulip fridge to cope with these gluts!

I’m picking at least once a day at the moment now the sun has made an appearance. Excuse my propped-in-hedge-with-timer-by-compost-bags, very tangled version of a style over-the-shoulder harvest pic, but it’s exciting to have such abundance after very nearly not even getting these in the ground last December! I feel my lovely friend with me whenever I’m in the patch at the moment and I know she’d be proud of me that these flowers made it. These are all for sale for in Katy’s name.

Available today are the jammy (£8/15) mix, a small double bunch (£10) and a big bunch (£15) of these elegant blush-edged primrose lily-flowered ones which I didn’t knowingly plant but are nonetheless beautiful.

The ranunculus bed is also suddenly blooming so I’ll be offering mixed garden bouquets from next week which will include these precious beauties. I’m trying to forget how much I spent on these specialist Italian corms and focus on the relief that I’ve got them to flower 😂

Truly tulip season in the cutting patch now. Jammy tulips are now £15 for a big bunch or £8 for a medium, because the doubles, and the Italian ranunculus, are hot on their heels! All tulip sales are going to in memory of my beautiful friend, so fill your home with colour and help a a local cause at the same time.

Pop me a WhatsApp to arrange collection or delivery within Earlswood.