Post, interrupted

I have been going through my blog posts and noticed this post, which I never got around to actually posting. I wrote the following on 6th May. What I failed to do at the time (probably due to Mr BT's broadband playing up) was upload the photo to go with it. And now I have no idea what flower I had in mind.

So, please help me! What flower springs to mind when you read the short post below? A gold star to the best answer.

"If this flower was a song, its soundtrack would be the wonderful, cheesy "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", sung by Andy Williams. Love it."

GBBD - November 09

Looking back at last year's blog, I didn't get around to posting on GBBD. This year, it was almost sunny, so out into the garden I went with the camera. There are still plenty of flowers about, but most look rather bedraggled and damaged by the heavy rain we've had over the past couple of days. Besides, these flowers featured in September's and October's GBBD.

Instead, here's a flower which has only just come out, and is crawling with bees, wasps and hoverflies making the most of the late autumn nectar.

Thanks, as always, to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day. Check out her blog for many, many more GBBD posts :)

Zen and the art of garden pottering

I twitter intermittently. There, it's out in the open, and I've admitted it. For those garden bloggers who twitter, you may have come across links to ThinkinGardens, a website that encourages a more critical analysis of gardens.

After having had a few Twitter discussions with Anne Wareham, I came across a book to which she contributed - Vista - the Culture and Politics of Gardens. It's a challenging book, and unlike many books on gardens, has no pretty pictures. I'm still ploughing through it. It has made me think, it has made me shout. Some of the essays seem like utter tripe.

One, however, has made me think about the importance of my garden. It's called 'Zen and the art of Tea Gardening' by Charles Chesshire. The essay talks about the importance of the 'roji', the tea garden where you leave behind the concerns of the real world and enter into a world where you purify the mind before entering the tea house. Traditionally, this is a pathway to the teahouse, where you stop along the way to contemplate views and statues which help clear your mind of everyday concerns.

Few gardens have a roji and a tea house, but how many of us take a walk around the garden after a hard day at work, in an attempt to calm the mind and take you out of yourself? Each small change in the plants, each view, helps to calm us, to purify the mind. We don't need a Japanese tea garden, just a little time to slowly walk and observe the small changes that take place in our gardens.

Take time to potter.