A Blog of Roses

Midsummer's Day at Brook Farm and what a beauty! Everything is looking healthy and bursting with life. Lots of roses are out and there are thousands more buds promising a lovely long flowering season.
This garden is now around six years old and is making us very happy. It is a garden made without a proper design or a planting plan, full of the things we love and tells a tale of our love of this place and the ongoing business of making a garden that is right for the land it sits in, right for him and right for me. It is a garden of compromises!

These pictures are some I have taken, but this week we were very lucky to have professional garden photographer, Julia Stanley, come and take some proper ones. I can't wait to see what she has done and see the garden through someone else's eyes. I have already seen a lovely shot she has taken of the old wreck of a 1950s caravan we have been meaning to remove for years. Now I think we might simply sow wild flowers in front of it and make it a bit of a homage to hippies!

Is our garden a work of art? I don't think so. It was not planned to be a work of art, it has no proper design, but I do often say to people that I paint with plants because I cannot draw, so I suppose I hope there is some artistic merit in it somewhere. What I am trying to do is create a feeling more than a look. One day I'd like to persuade the garden critic Anne Wareham to come and tell me what she thinks. In the meantime we shall continue to argue about it, enjoy it and share it with friends and guests as we have during the making of it these last six years and hope for lovely long sunny summer days as beautiful as this.