Amber’s Garden

I’m always on the lookout for flowers to add to my beautifully colourful and eclectic cottage garden. You know- the one that only exists in my mind. Despite living in the same house for eight years, every spring I seem to find myself confronted with the same blank earth, followed by an overly exuberant (and expensive) dash to the garden centre.

Not so this year, as my friend Amber volunteered some Verbena. When I popped over for coffee yesterday I was planning to simply pinch a couple pots to add to my plot, and instead revelled in an hour of raiding her beautiful garden, talking Island life and guessing plant names (my favourite being ‘yellow things’, which is now officially stamped on a plant label in my garden.)

I left with a car packed full of oregano, primrose, crocosmia, hollyhocks, and said ‘yellow things’; all essential ingredients in any self-respecting garden. I’ve plopped them in my soil in the hope they’ll survive, reassuring myself with Amber’s instructions to ‘just chuck them in’. I feel the pressure to make them succeed. Grow my pretties, grow…