How am I to deal with the mornings? Exercising first thing is supposed to get the endorphins going. I keep trying, but I’m not convinced that’s working for me any more. I went out into the garden to water the plants but got depressed at how scraggy and tired everything looks, how little colour there is (except for the red valerian – which isn’t really valerian, but I can never remember its real name, and it spreads everywhere).
Every day I struggle to find something decent to take pictures of – I committed myself at the start of the year to posting a photo on Facebook for every day of the year, but as I don’t go anywhere it has become a chore to find anything, especially as I can’t see anything on my phone when I’m outdoors, so have to keep pointing and clicking then half the time come back in and find I’ve completely missed the intended subject or chopped it in half. So I’m posting a lot of pictures of my cat, who can be relied on to be photogenic, and as far as the garden goes, sometimes I’m able to get close up to individual flowers before they give up and die (quite often they are weeds anyway) and no long shots of the garden to show how little interest it holds.
The hydrangea is the next thing which has flowers currently in bud, opening one floret at a time. I’ve also got another hydrangea which doesn’t do so well, the last two years it hasn’t flowered at all, and apparently gives up and dies around mid-July, though it has dragged itself back to life in late spring both years. The lavender has no flower buds at all that I can see – I pruned it last year to stop it getting over-straggly, I did it immediately after the flowers died, which I thought was what you’re supposed to do so it doesn’t affect the next year’s flowers, but that doesn’t seem to have worked. The sedums are in bud though, so I suppose I have those to look forward to. I think there used to be some day lilies in one of the beds, but can’t see any signs of flower buds yet, just a confused lot of leaves which I can’t identify. Last year I let the red valerian have its head – because it’s colourful, at least – and it has pretty much taken over everything, along with the weedy white cranes-bill geraniums which sprout up all over the ‘lawn’ (in between the buttercups) and pretty much everywhere else.
I have thought about having the ‘patio’ properly paved, but it’s quite interesting seeing the range of weeds that push up through the gravel. I forgot to mention the fennel, something else that appears everywhere. And the white snapdragons that I found (in the gravel) when I hacked back some of the valerian – I took some pictures, none were good enough to share, and they haven’t flowered since.
