Our garden

First things first, I am a very lucky knitblogger this week, as I have won Erin's weekly prize in her ongoing birthday draw! There is some lovely pink laceweight yarn, along with choccies and a very cute stuffed toy ram :-) I'm looking forward to the parcel arriving! Thanks Erin! Please do pop over and visit her blog :-)

No knitting photos until this weekend at the earliest, but I took these yesterday in our back garden. We've been out after work this week planting tubs and sorting out the borders, given the splendid weather.

First the border by the house. This is in shade most of the time, so we have lots of ferns and hostas in there. The first photo is the left hand side, mostly shuttlecock ferns which self-seed (spore) at an alarming rate! They are just unfurling the croziers, in a couple of weeks this bed will be a mass of green. There are also some bluebells in here that we inherited, these have the most amazing scent at night-time. Also hostas which again are just starting to unfurl their leaves.



This is the right hand side of the same border. I've replanted it this week with an Aquilegia, some foxgloves and a curly-fronded fern. This involved digging out the hardy geranium which has been there since we moved in 8 years ago. I saved a couple of pieces and replanted them under the trees, next to where Oz is buried.



The window with the vertical blinds is ours, the other one is next door's conservatory! There is probably what, 5 feet or so between them. They have built right on the property line. I have no idea what kind of planning permission was sought, but if we'd lived here at the time, we may well have objected to the proximity! You can see why we have vertical blinds :-)

This is one of our baskets, this has tumbler cherry tomatoes along with some violas (again these have quite am amazng scent especially at night). I'll hopefully get some photos of the other baskets and tubs in a few weeks' time when they have had a chance to mature a little.



Finally for today we have the border at the other side of the lawn (you can see the far right of the house border at top left). This was planted from scratch last summer, after we had had a new lawn laid. There used to be a much deeper border there but we didn't really have the time to wade in there in recent years and it was getting out of hand. From left to right we have creeping thyme, rosemary, lavender, I think a giant campanula, Abelia (variegated small shrub), creeping campanula, two different Phlox, a deep almost-black Viola, some inherited blue and white bells, and our ferns and hostas again.



I have now swept the patio, by the way :-)

Latifa is on track to be finished this weekend. I realised that I actually started it in January! It kept being put aside for other projects though, bad me. Much knitting temptation arrived in the form of the new Interweave Knits. I love "Pink Mimosa", the sleeveless wrap cardi with the lace edgings, and I would definitely knit a number of the patterns in there. They have a great feature about lace knitting (or knitting lace), and reference Eunny's tutorials which by coincidence I had been reading earlier that day. Has anyone else invested in a set of blocking wires for lace? I saw the link on AY forums today and thought it looked like a very useful item to have.

I will catch up with comments and some other bits and bobs tomorrow or Sunday :-)