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| Bailey Park, Abergavenny, April 8th |
Most of March was sunny and warm - sitting-outside-in-shirtsleeves weather! - and the driest month for 50 years, apparently. When the month ended with a few days of wind and rain, I thought it was 'going out like a lion' and that we'd revert to our normal, less than wonderful, British weather.
But no, we've been enjoying almost wall-to-wall sunshine and daytime temperatures that should belong at the end of May, even though it seems such a short time ago that we were comparing the depth of our snow on Twitter! It looks as if it's on the change now, though and maybe that was our summer?
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| Bailey Park, Abergavenny, 8th April |
Most of the daffodils are long gone and dead-headed and these tulips in the park won't last much longer so I 'snapped' them on my way back from shopping on Friday.
So now I think I've posted images of the park that I cross to go shopping in all seasons.
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| Bailey Park, Abergavenny, 8th April |
But here's the big shock!
I opened my back door to the garden a couple of mornings ago and, just outside, I found this!
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| Iceland Poppy, early April, 2011 |
The back of the seed packet says that it should start flowering in June, but this is one from last year that survived the record low winter temperatures - although you can see that the pot was less hardy! - so maybe that, as well as the remarkable weather, is why it is flowering so early?
Meanwhile, I've sown some Icelandic Poppy seeds, hoping that I might be lucky and get some pink ones. But the seeds are tiny and have germinated in clumps so I'm afraid a great many of them will have to be discarded. That's something I don't feel very comfortable doing - I have a book called, 'Plants are like People' and I tend to agree!
I've also spotted buds on several of my roses and I have the feeling that I shall soon be working on photographic images for my greeting cards etc rather than drawings and paintings. Last summer was like that and the poppies were an especially fruitful source of designs. The one above featured on coffee mugs and even Keds shoes as well as greeting cards - as you can see here.
6 comments:
Gotta love it! Thanks for sharing the beautiful flower photos! What a wonderful thing to find a flower blooming outside your back door.
Thank you, Brenda. Yes, I find flowers bursting into bloom very uplifting amidst all the gloom we hear about on the news!
Yes the weather has been delightful, despite me getting my summer clothes out which generally forcasts a sudden bout of late snow...
It's a little cooler here today, but I too have tulips, no poppies yet though!
I'm the same with summer clothes, Michele! And I did venture into something a little less wintry on Sunday and lo! the weather turned cooler!
The poppy was a huge surprise for me too!
How wonderful, we're about a month away from that yet
It's really unusual for us too and some of the flowers in my garden are more than a month early! But it's been going that way for a few years now and I think the gardening books and seed packets will have to be rewritten to take this into account!
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