In a Vase on Monday: A Delicate Matter

As a change from brash and bright dahlias, I am delighted to have a more delicate vase to share with you this week.

As well as the Winter Sunshine sweet peas I usually sow a more ordinary mix, sowing both in October, but never have much success with the latter. This year, I was trialling some sweet peas for ‘Which? Gardening’, a variety called ‘Betty Maiden’, sowing them when they arrived at the end of March. As you can see from the vase, they are still flowering at the end of September, and I guess this is due to the time of sowing and not the actual variety, a soft flecked and shaded lilac. Next year I shall leave sowing all my summer sweet peas until spring in anticipation of a longer and more prolific crop – but that’s another story.

In the meantime, the sweet young lady is joined in a matching Caithness Glass vase by gomphrena from a packet of mixed colours (but almost exclusively white), left over from last year, and Ammi visnaga. The gomphrena seedlings were planted out into a pot where they just sat and got on with flowering for several months – barely reaching 6″ or so in height, they don’t have much of an impact in a pot but make a pretty addition to a vase. The prop is the first volume of a diary I kept continuously for about 10 years from the age of 14, which in later years may well have contained information of a delicate nature; earlier volumes, however, were more about falling out with friends and being too shy to talk to boys.

If you have blooms or other material in your garden that you have time to pick for a vase today, we would be delighted if you chose to share it with us by leaving links to and from this post. In the meantime, thank you for all your kind comments last week which were much appreciated.