A Cornucopia of Colour

The front garden looking stunning on a sunny day

In the last month, the garden has erupted in a rainbow of colours. The front garden is particularly stunning, probably helped by having a relatively long warm autumn last year and a comparatively warm winter. This meant the growing season only really slowed down, rather than stopping completely.

Its always interesting to see what pops up in the garden: I'm pretty sure some things have been moved by squirrels as they are definitely not in places I remember planting them [e.g. the lovely purple allium heads that I planted a good number of years ago - but have only seen this year]. Some years there is a bit of a monoculture - such as the year with the ox-eye daisies taking over. But this year there seems to be a really nice mosaic of plants and colours.

All the flowers below were out in May/early June and I've collated by colour as there were too many to fit them all on one image!

White Flowers

So going clockwise from the left-most image on the top row:

Ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), Geranium versicolour, Woodruff (Galium odoratum), Mexican Orange Blossom (Choisya ternata), Tiny Vetch (Vicia hirsuata), White Campion (Silene latifolia), Pineberry (Fragaria x ananassa) - a type of strawberry.

Blue Flowers

Here we have the stunning blue lupin [self seeded from next door several years ago and always provides plenty of seeds!] (Lupinus angustifolius), Bugle (Ajuga reptans), native Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), Blue Camassia (Camassia quamash), Water Forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpioides), Phacelia tanacetifolia.

Purple & Pink Flowers

While I confess to not being a fan of the colour pink, I really love the darker pink/purple colourations. Here we have:

Purple allium (Allium hollandicum), Clematis montana, Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus), Red Campion (Silene dioica), Sweet Peas [which impressively survived the winter outside], Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris) - can't remember which variety, Red clover (Trifolium pratense), Thistle (Cirsium sp.) - unknown variety, Weigela, African Daisy Osteospermum 'Nairobi Purple').

Yellow, Orange & Red Flowers

And finally we have the yellow, orange and red flowers which include: Welsh Poppy (Papaver cambricum), Creeping Buttercup (Ranunculus repens), Californian Poppy (Eschscholzia californica), Hawkweed sp (Hieracium) - not even going to try and identify anything from this huge (10,000+ species and subspecies) family! Bird's-foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), Marigold (Calendula Officinalis), Geum 'Fiery Tempest', Broom (Cytisus 'Lena'), Geum 'Mrs Bradshaw', Escallonia Rubra Macrantha.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else will flower this summer!