Hello everyone, welcome to this month’s market days, where I share whatever flowers are in season and available at the flower market. After last month’s peonies, this month’s focus is on summer flowers.
Nigella or love-in-a-mist
But maybe I should begin with: hello, is anybody there? After all, it’s finally summer. We have had our first official heat wave, and everyone seems to be getting ready for the great escape. When the weather gets warm, people spend more time outdoors, take time off from work, have long weekend escapes and go on holiday, while watching less television and spending less time online. And that’s a good thing! I hope, you too, are taking some time off, spending time with friends and family and enjoying the outdoors.
Do you remember your biology lessons back in school? Did you and your class at any time go outside to collect plants and flowers to dry and study? Most kids didn’t take this project too seriously. Of course, I did. And I still like to collect leaves and flowers. I often press them between the pages of the dictionary or in my flower press. Sometimes I display them in a frame.
The best thing about a holiday is that you finally get to read all the books that have been piling up on your nightstand. I love to read, but find myself reading less and less. As a mother of four, there is always something to do and these things, or persons, always seem to need my immediate attention.
So when we went on a holiday to Rhodes, the sunshine island in the Aegean sea, I not only packed holiday essentials such as summer dresses, sunglasses, and bikinis, but also a stack of books. My boys need lots of food, and they love to swim. We stayed in a hotel with a swimming pool and a breakfast and dinner buffet with great food, so the basics were covered.
Hydrangea, dispassion
We explored the island’s beautiful beaches, swam in the turquoise blue sea, strolled through the picturesque streets of Rhodes town and ended our days besides the pool, with a book and a beer. I managed to read two books, cover to cover! Continue reading The language of flowers: a novel
Three weeks ago my friend Bex nominated me for a Liebster award. The Liebster award is all about discovering new blogs to follow, so I was very happy to pass it on to three newer bloggers whose blogs I love.
As a flower lover and aspiring gardener, of course, I chose my nominees among like-minded flower enthusiasts.
One of the bloggers I would like you to discover is a fellow countrywoman, Marieke Nolsen. She is a florist and a gardener with a lush floral blog. She doesn’t have much time to write, but she shares lovely pictures of her garden flowers. I especially love the collages she creates, with pictures of yellow and white spring flowers, different kinds of small purple flowering plants, or a variety of purple pansies. She really has an eye for colour and a distinct style.
Violas are her favourites. I told you in my market days March how people are anxious to get some colour in the garden, they can’t resist the happy faces of the pansies. This lady certainly didn’t hold back!
Marieke hosts floral workshops using seasonal flowers, preferably from the garden, creating natural floral arrangements. She also has a passion for gardening and gardens as she arranges flowers or vice versa. I would love to join one of her workshops one day, I definitely need to practise my flower arranging skills, but for now I had to settle for a visit to her garden.
Marieke lives in an old farmhouse that used to be part of an estate, Den Treek. The estate consists of woodland and heather, it’s very popular at weekends. We like to take the kids there for a walk or even a picnic in summer.
Cuckoo flowers, or pinksterbloemen, in the meadow behind the house
The garden surrounding Marieke’s house is divided into four ‘rooms’ each with a separate identity. The garden was designed to fit the characteristic farmhouse, the flowering plants carefully selected to match the colours of the house.
The garden consists of several flower beds, full of perennials and shrubs. Because she loves to work with fresh-from-the-garden material these are mostly flowers and foliage for cutting, like crab apples and hydrangea.
Last autumn Marieke went to a visit a large flower bulb grower and exporter. The flower bulbs were reasonably priced, she just couldn’t resist them and bought 1500 bulbs! It took two days to plant all the bulbs in the garden beds.
Several times a year the garden is open to visitors. Marieke, of course, was anxious to have the garden ready for spring. She was hoping for flowers beds overflowing with tulips and visitors enjoying the bounty of spring bulbs. But, of course, you can’t fight Mother Nature.
This spring has been unusually cold and dry. As a result, blooms were about a month late. Only a few of the 200 tulips or so that were planted in autumn started blooming. Did they suffer from the cold, or did the voles (woelmuis in Dutch) get to them? These are the sorrows of gardening.
Despite these sorrows, there was still plenty to enjoy. The tulips that were in bloom, were beautiful, with large flowers on sturdy stems.
The combination of daffodils, white Lunaria, Muscari and yellow aquilegia in the front garden perfectly matches the white and soft yellow of the house. The aquilegia was planted to fill the gaps of the missing tulips. In my garden, it doesn’t bloom just yet.
The pots filled with white pansies, narcissus (Thalia) and dark green, almost black, holly made a very pretty picture.
I hope you enjoyed this garden tour as much as I have. I can’t wait to visit it again in summer and see the hydrangea in bloom! I promise I will take you there again.
Today being the last day of April, I hope to see you again next week for Market days April.
March seems to have been much colder, wetter and darker than February. So, no sunshine on this month’s market pictures, just grey skies, and raindrops.
I love flowers and have always enjoyed a bouquet of fresh flowers in the house. Flowers are relatively cheap in the Netherlands and even in winter, there is an abundant choice of flowers and colours. I usually buy my flowers at the market. I love going to the historic city centre each week to buy vegetables and bread.
There is so much to see and always something to taste at the market. I enjoy the lively atmosphere in the streets and squares on market days.
We live in a small but lively old city close to Amsterdam. We have it all: the canals, the canal houses, the picturesque bridges, but on a much smaller scale. You can even take a cruise through the canals. This is not a commercial canal cruise like the ones in Amsterdam, the captain and guide are senior citizens volunteering.
It is still winter but there are signs of spring everywhere. The snowdrops are the first flowers to bloom in our garden. Two varieties of hellebores lighten up the back garden, they are so pretty. There are also some green hellebores in the front garden. They don’t get much sun so they probably won’t open for weeks.
I love flowers but I never grew my own flowers. Having a small garden, and four little boys who wanted to play in that garden definitely had something to do with it. But then we moved to a new house with trees in the garden for the boys to climb in. It was a dream come true.
The house used to belong to an old lady and the garden was rather neglected. With moving house for the second time in one year, and still a lot of painting to do, gardening wasn’t the first thing on my mind.
