A summer's day

Yesterday was a day of sunshine & heat. For the first time this year we spent a while playing dominoes in the garden. We went on to eat out there, appreciating our plants & avian visitors as we did. However, by the time we‘d finished our roast chicken & bottle of wine the skies had clouded over & a chilly wind was getting up. We didn’t bother to stay for the ice-cream we were intending to have. Instead we hurried back in, quite expecting it to rain before long. Oh well, such is an English summer!

Going chicken

Today I decided I would experiment a bit with the vegetables for once. We’re going to have ginger-garlic carrots. All the ingredients are stir-fried together. As you know we do love our carrots & this may be an agreeable variation on our usual glossy carrots.

I was intending to use up some chicken breasts that were in the freezer, to accompany the carrots. I thought a Chicken & Sweetcorn Pie perhaps. However the Fox planted the idea of a roast in my head. He pointed out we hadn’t had a roast in ages, & certainly not a roast chicken this year. I checked my freezer list. Sure enough, there aren’t any parcels of leftover cooked chicken, a sure sign of us having a roast. I relented. So yesterday we went off to the butcher & bought a whole chicken ready to roast today.

As for the chicken breasts, I breadcrumbed them & fried them for dinner yesterday. Delicious. It isn’t often I cook them so simply, but they were very moist & tasty. It amazes me how much more tender & succulent meat can be as a result of simply using a bit off egg & some breadrumbs as opposed to grilling or frying without such a coating.

The garden

Our new garden continues to surprise us.

Yesterday I was suddenly struck by the appearance of a flower, so dark it almost looked black. I had to go & have a look. It turned out to be an almost chocolate coloured clematis.

We seem to have gained various varieties of clematis & so different. On the main pergola a white one grows. It seems to be an early spring-flowering variety with small white flowers akin to the montana variety.  Those flowers are now nearly gone. On another upright of the pergola is another clematis that is almost over, only this one is even smaller & more wispy than flowery. That was even earlier flowering. Maybe we just had too many winds at the time for the flower to properly set.

As the year’s gone on a large mauve & white clematis opened up. It is now joined by a large pink & white one & this chocolate one. Even further up is another wispy one, more like a beard than a flower.

Way up the top end of the garden a foxglove stands so tall his head peers over the 5ft fence. Truly gorgeous. I love the markings on the inside of bell flowers.

What looked like a rather boring silver leaf plant suddenly opened into white bells. Nearby is another plant that is covered with pretty pink, rather papery looking flowers. The flowers only seem to last a day but there are so many buds that there is no shortage of pink.

The delphiniums, too, are opening up, white, navy & cobalt blue, as the lupins die down & turn to furry seed pods.

The roses are covered with white blooms that smell so sweet. They look quite beautifully shaped as buds but turn more cabbagy as they open out. I can forgive that for that wonderful scent.

The peonies are opening up, two deep red with bright yellow stamens, two pink ones. All are standing very erect, unusual for peonies as their blossoms almost seem to be too heavy for the stems to remain upright without staking.

The lavender is turning purple but that we expected. It was in flower when it was planted last summer. So many of these other plants had bloomed & lost their flowers before they were planted so we had no idea of what to expect. So many name tags either meant nothing to me or blew off during the winter months so this year has been one long wonderful surprise.

Some plants have seeded themselves so we have a huge red poppy in the midst of a group of hostas, some tiny violas with their smiley faces peeping out behind the astilbe.

We were also delighted last night to find the small birds have finally found the new bird feeding station. The collared doves & wood-pigeons found it immediately. The blackbirds too. But last night, as we waited for the dinner to cook, we saw the arrival of a flock of starlings & some house sparrows. We even had a jackdaw turn up & we haven’t seen one of those here for a long time if ever. Hopefully all will return in the coming days.

It’s been a real pleasure & delight seeing how the garden evolves over the year.