My Garden

...and my nightdress

I wanted to show you an update on my birch tree in a basket situation. I ordered this tree back in xxx last year and put it in this gigantic woven basket (interior of which is basically a huge plastic pot on wheels). I deliberately chose this container for its texture because SOFTNESS.

Lots of the things I cook up in my head and spend a lot of time on don’t end up actually working. I think I might write a post next week on one of these almighty failures. This, however, even by my own ridiculously high standards has been an unmitigated triumph. I am so happy every time I look at this group of containers.

The birch was planted, along with this watering reservoir and I made a sort of woodland floor for it (pics here), from moss, and I planted small daffodils, snakes head fritillaries and primula which are still flowering now. This lovely scene, along with the woven pot has been delighting me while the tree remained bare over the winter months, but now it has burst into leaf, and I am CHARMED.

I’ve surrounded the pot with two hornbeams which I am slowly training into domes, a wide terracotta pot full of daffodils, and another broken pot with a very happy fern inside of it. I am absolutely in LOVE. I feel like I am in a wood.

Being in a wood (some sort of leafy canopy) is where I would like to be all of the time. The brilliant Grace has been writing about refuge and prospect on The Garden Collective and getting that right balance is something that really resonated with me. You can read or listen to this piece for free here.

Here are my tulips.

I was conservative with them this year, as I filled two giant pots at the far end of the garden with permanent Pittosporum tobira ‘nanum’. This tulip mix is from Sarah Raven. I really love the mixture of floppy frilly parrots with the more upright pointy ones. One of my cats has developed an absolute obsession with tulip petals. She strips them off and chomps at them noisily. Any tulips I cut and put on the table suffer the fate of being denuded within hours. The potted ones, however, seem to have evaded her for now.

Finally, here is the ‘meadow’, in which I have spent five minutes every day removing the leading shoots from most of what is coming up in order to delay flowering and prevent it from falling over. I put quite a few alliums in here last autumn but not a single one has come up (another utter failure). But I love the softness of this patch right now, and I cannot wait for it to be buzzing with bees and butterflies like last year.

I went shopping today, to try on a skirt that’s been haunting me for a while - it’s this one. I have a couple of things from this brand which I adore and wear on repeat, including another full skirt like made of a horse blanket - heaven.

I like full skirts that keep their shape, almost as if one were wearing a hoop beneath (one is NOT), but because I love this shape, I’m always on the lookout for skirts made of thick fabric that sort of stick out nicely. This one has the added joy of an incredibly deep hem…I think it may even be interfaced because it makes the bottom third of the skirt quite stiff, which I love. Anyway, it was utter perfection, ….literally the perfect skirt…BRAVO!!! …except for the colour which I just cannot pull off, so I will just have to wait patiently until they bring out a different one.

On the same street, there was a shop full of my favourite nightdresses.

They make really good nightdresses, but are mostly online, so I tried on all the styles. The lovely thing about a nightdress is that it will always fit (hurrah!), but I was able to find my favourite, which is this one called Isabel…super-thin cotton and a incredibly flattering neckline…also because the thinnest weight of cotton is just the tiniest bit see-through, (quite sexy actually) they do a slightly thicker one. I might get that too so I can garden in it.

Enough…

Absolutely dreadful gardening failures next week!

x Laetitia