9th June 3pm:  the garden basks in afternoon heat and light.  Days like this  in  our hit and miss summers are precious,  as all worthwhile things are. The bees are here again, feasting on the fluffy alliums and there`s a haze of blue nigella magic from a  packet of seeds. Blue and purple, purple and green: summer colour pairs which work so naturally and beautifully.  Framing the left and right borders  lush green and pink, the usual, but never  taken for granted , bowing  and flopping roses are  sweet with soap scent..

Tags: summer, alliums, garden, purple, blue, green, purecolour, simplestyle

When the garden is looking as heavenly as it is at the moment I have no huge  need to spread my wings in search of new excitement. ( Although   I  would rather like to go dancing.......  ) This week it is our clever lodger Jeffrey`s birthday and there is cake for tea and all the gorgeous purples and greens of  early summer to mark the occasion.

 Lucky to have the last fading tulip petals (they`re edible!) to decorate a chocolate  Victoria sponge using the recipe from my cookbook, and  to enjoy it against a garden canvas of alliums and lime green lavender and lemon balm leaves:  one of my favourite colour pairings.

See  how  a purple/green combination works in printed floral  cotton: a remnant used to patch one of my chidren`s jeans pocket.

Tags: purple, lime green, purestylecolour, summer, baking, chocolate, garden

 I`m  as besotted with my garden as the bees are sated on sweet nectar from the  starry alliums.  It feels almost electric with activity:  bursting glossy pink roses, voluptuous  peonies  shedding  brilliant carpets of petals and crowds of  bees,  enough, if there  were such a thing for a bee club night. I get up close, eye to bee pollen sack with  black and white striped ones,  fat yellow ones,  small bobbly hairy ones,  brown fluffy types as if they`d had a cut and blow dry.

Growing, budding, flowering,  seeding on a still warm  June afternoon the garden seems  more dynamic than the brains in any government think tank. Only joking, but as  George Eliot suggested "If we could hear the squirrel`s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar" .

 The garden soothes, me with its it`s distractions and needs.  What better way than to work off writers block or  parking ticket annoyance with the  physicality and sense of purpose that an hour`s weeding gives.  The fact that  nature is ambiguous, that she is neither all good nor all bad, that she gives as well as takes away, also  puts life outside the garden into perspective.   Contentment with green fly free roses, fury at the  bullet headed snails who strafe the  rocket, it`s all about the ups and downs and the getting on with what is thrown at you.  A dancing in the rain approach., rather than waiting for the storm to pass  I suppose.

 Pink rose love: gorgeous Constance Spry with a scent that almost knocks you out in a perfumed stupor.  I  cut them for a jug on the table and take bundles  tied with string to friends` as a  summer offering.

Each summer, my mum`s peonies, lifted from her garden after she died, produce more and more pink memories of her and my
childhood .

On the subject of the colour purple, it`s the most wonderful colour to go with the  greens of the garden.  Purple alliums, as you might have noticed are my latest crush.   I could never have predicted this after been subjected to years of  school uniform in a particularly brash shade of the colour , which topped with a  hideous purple  berets marked us out as targets for ridicule at the wild and untamed  bus stops of South London.

Tags: garden, summer, alliums, purple,