sweet peas

This afternoon I have been trying to get the sweetpeas under control - the strong winds had tangled up a lot of the stems, blowing them off the frame and the miserable weather had made me put off doing anything about them. The result was a whole load of flapping stems at funny angles and hoop shaped stems. Today has been sunny though and it is good to have a job to do that isn't muddy so that I can still serve in the shop.

So I have cut off most of the old leaves and the tendrils - the former so that the plant's energy goes into making long stems rather than supporting the leaves and the latter so that the stems don't get caught and bent by the tendrils clinging on. It is a tedious job really and the sweet pea vine looks much worse afterwards - a gangly mass of awkward stems - but hopefully by the middle of next week it will be covered in flowers again.

The sweet pea bouquet was put together for a man who ordered our whole sweet pea crop (120 stems) today for his wife - how romantic is that?

Schools out for summer - what summer?

Tomorrow school breaks up for the long summer vacation - this is a great benefit of living in Scotland, allowing speedy Scottish parents to take cheaper summer holidays before the English schools break up and it becomes high season prices.

I love the summer holidays - though this year we are not going away. I love the more relaxed pace, the children being able to just mooch and read and draw if they want to, without the pressure and rush of having to be at set places at particular times. I love the fact they don't have to dress up or wear uniform.

We have a relaxed house over the holidays as I still have to work so while I do that, they can do pretty much what they like (as long as it doesn't involve television or power tools).

Last summer was glorious, the sun shone all holiday and the children turned almost feral with sun kissed hair and ingrained dirt from days spent outside making dens and lying in the grass. This year - despite the promised hot summer - it does not look as good. Thank heavens we have not had the rain that has effected Yorkshire but today it is cold with a steady drizzle.

I think that I shall have to go and stock up on lots of glitter and glue.

I am helped as well by the fact that the girls spend 2 weeks each summer with my parents which allows me to compensate for the slower pace of life when they are here. Many other working parents are not as lucky - and it makes you see why mothers are desperate for jobs that have the school holidays off - I know nurses, dentists and pr people who are all working as classroom assistants simply because the holidays fit in with their lives.

The picture is of a box of flower posies destined for the lucky teachers at a local school.

A suprise amongst the thistles

I am not the world's greatest weeder - somehow it just all gets away from me and I am stuck at this time of year saying "just where did all those thistles come from?", "How can we have so much couch grass?", "What would actually exterminate creeping buttercup?"

The garden goes from looking artily meadowish to being a great lump of unstoppable weeds (oh the garden club visiting in a fortnight will not be impressed).

However one advantage is this - look a self sown orchid - it is only a common orchid, we have then down in the damp field, but it has sown itself in a patch of briza maxima grass and looks suitably exotic.

This evening I have ordered our pigs - two piglets arrive a week today so tomorrow we shall have to get the patch of ground ready for them - the idea is that they will clear the ground so that we can plant willows and dogwoods in the autumn. I am very fond of pigs but shall have to remember not to get too fond of these ones

When to cut flowers - daisy types

Today I had a meeting with a bride who is going to be getting married in Scotland in August but who lives in New York. She was wanting wild looking flowers for her wedding but was worried that they would droop and die within the day.

It turns out that she regularly buys flowers from a New York Farmers Market and they are all dead within a couple of days. She thinks it is the type of flower and inevitable.

This really shouldn't happen and that it does is a big problem for me.

My biggest problem in the business is getting people to trust that flowers picked from a garden will last. I guarantee that all but a few varieties (sweetpeas, lilac for example) will last more or less a week, many last longer.

Garden flowers won't last as long as an irradiated carnation but then again do you really want flowers hanging around so long that you have to dust them? They certainly do not die within a couple of days.

I think that part of the problem is that people remember their own clammy hand childhood attempts to pick flowers - the slightly bent bunch presented to Mums after a walk in the country.

It is also something not helped by the magazines - the recent feature in Country Living Magazine on the flowers sold by Wiggly Wigglers is an example.

Now Wiggly Wigglers is a reputable company - they will not be sending over-ripe flowers through the post but the photo shows them proudly displaying a bunch with cosmos flowers in it that have been pollinated and should be in the bin, not in a bouquet. The photo must have been a last minute set up.

Perhaps this seems petty - it is a very pretty photo but it gives people the wrong idea about when flowers should be cut for the house and they won't have good results. I don't think it is good for Wiggly Wigglers either as it presumably misrepresents their product, but then control of the photos after the shoot is very difficult.


Anyway I thought that I would put in a couple of photos of the chrysanthemum "Duro" a lovely small cerise flower that sees me through the early June gap.

The top photo is exactly right - the central boss is tight and flat with only the very outer edge of the yellow showing pollen.

The one at the bottom shows the fluffy pollinated bit halfway up the yellow - this is too far gone, the bees have been at it and all that flower want to do now is curl up and become a seedhead.

The top flower will last 7-10 days away from direct sunlight - the bottom one would do well to stagger through 2!

Reception rant

The wedding where I was arranging the flowers had the reception at one of the hotels on the banks of Loch Lomond. The hotel attracts wedding couples with its spectacular views over the Loch but on days like yesterday - where you couldn't actually see the water from the function room - it presumably has to offer something else.

I am not mentioning the name of the hotel as this is going to be a wee bit of a rant.

The bride wanted very simple understated flowers so at the reception there was just to be small table centres - so far, so easy - I was just to drop them off after I had arranged the church flowers.

At least that was the idea - I arrived and this was the entrance for the wedding party. Actually that is not quite true as I took this photo after I had already done a lot of litter picking. 2 rather ill looking bay trees in chipped plastic pots and weedy soil - covered in old dirty plastic ribbons, most of which had come undone.

I spoke to the hotel about it and they said "Oh the brides usually bring their own ribbon" - not "Oh goodness you are right that looks terrible I shall get someone onto it" - not even "Do you have any suggestions?" just a "that's not my problem" attitude. I still can't believe that they were happy for the bridal party to arrive in their lovely clothes, step from their fancy cars into an area of soiled decorations, seedy looking trees and cigarette ends.

There wasn't really that much I could really - I weeded the trees, picked up the litter, removed the dirty curly ribbon and cut off the yellow dead leaves. I had some wired grosgrain ribbon left over from the church flowers so I tied that round the trunks and cut some oxe-eye daisies from the carpark verge, threading them into the trees as a bit of decoration. There was nothing I could do about the chipped pots or the general air of sodden neglect.

It all seems so unnecessary.



These are the table decorations for the inside! A mix of mint, rosa "William Lobb", sweetpea "Matucana"; eryngium "Miss Willmotts Ghost" and nepeta "Souvenir d'Andre Chaumont".

20 years and counting.

Tomorrow Euan and I celebrate dating for 20 years. We have married, bought houses and had children in those 2 decades but 24th June is still the most important date in the year.

We had known each other as friends for a good while when we started "courting" - as my Grandad termed it - so it was never going to be a casual, take it or leave it, affair. There was too much to risk losing.

Still 20 years is a long time and we have both changed a lot from our 18 year old selves. Probably for the better . . . definitely for the better.

Tomorrow I shall be arranging flowers for a wedding in Luss and Euan shall be putting the roof on his shed. Then we have a babysitter booked!

William Lobb

Despite the fact that they are the most asked for flower, I do not grow many roses. Our climate is really too damp and it is very difficult to grow roses commercially without using a lot of herbicides and fungicides. As Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Company pointed out, brides don't want greenfly climbing out of their bouquets.

Last year however a 3 for 1 end of season offer came in from David Austin that was just too tempting and I plumped for 3 moss roses called William Lobb (named after the Cornish plant collector), planting them with the growth tied to a dome made from hazel so that they will become a flowery heap in the border. Eventually they will be 8' tall.

They have just begun to flower - the bluest dark pink I have ever seen with a lovely scent. They have been a joy since the oddly bumpy buds arrived.

I am doing flowers for a wedding on Sunday and hope to use some of these in the table decorations - if I can bear to part with them that is.

Business guru

This is the man I have been spending the past couple of days with (well in print anyway) - he is Michael Gerber, author of the book The E Myth Revisited.

As I have explained before I tend to lose books, sending them home with people and then never getting them back again. This happened last summer with my copy of the E Myth and I have finally cracked and picked up another copy.

The reason is, besides my compulsive book buying habit, is that it is quite simply an inspirational book. It shows how small businesses, particularly ones like mine founded on the fact that I can technically do things (sewing, gardening), fail because you are so busy, busy, busy doing the day to day stuff - the making, the selling, the invoicing, the packing, the meetings with clients, the floor sweeping, the weeding- that you forget to give any time over to actually building the business itself.

This is one of those books that pinpoint all your faults, make you accept them and THEN shows you how to change them.

It takes a lot of discipline though - it is a lot of hard work of a different kind, working on and not in your business - and I am just at the beginning.

But the change is in my brain - all day it has been fizzing fizzing, fizzing with ideas and plans and concrete ways forward to have the kind of integrated life and business that I want. And it does physically feel as though I am fizzing - peculiar.

Now I just need to carry it all through and create this wonderful thing that is Snapdragon.

I would also like to point out that I am not a self-help book kind of person - I phoned the only other person I know of who has systematically gone through the whole E-myth process (rather than just read the book and say "that's a good idea") and she was even more effusive - even though I was phoning out of the blue - it has completely changed her life and business. Well that is some recommendation.

I'll let you know how I get on. Fizzz, fizzzzz, fizzzzz

Magazine madness . . .

Yesterday I went into Glasgow to sort out a few things - I had an hour to spare while the shop tried to fix our i-pod battery so went to Borders magazine department.

Ah, fatal - all the imports were just in (its work you know!) - and I am a sucker for nice photos and 101 ways with ric-rac.

Actually the aesthetic of most of the US magazines is a bit too frilly and pristine for me but in some ways that is ideal for inspiration as I can't accidentally slide into full on plagiarism (see Gigibird for an interesting post on this). The uppermost magazine is new to me - an Australian production though with Abigail Ahern's house and also somewhere very very nice and calm in the Netherlands.

Getting this bag bursting lot took 5 minutes so I went for a coffee at the hyper stylish Fifi and Ally.

Flowers are very emotive things. I am always reminded of that at this time of year as the first sweet peas and sweet williams arrive in the shop and customers begin to reminisce about their grandparents gardens.

I too associate particular flowers with particular people - foxgloves, at their peak this week, I associate with my Australian friend Sue.

Sue moved with her family to stay in a cottage near our old house for the year of 1998 when her husband Phil worked on a job exchange. Sue is one of these people with a natural ease which makes everything that she does appear to be exactly the way it should be done.

She loves flowers but the exchange rate difference made Scotland a very expensive place to stay, particularly with 3 children. There was no room in her weekly budget for the flowers she was used to buying back in Melbourne. So she would pick cow parsley and foxgloves from the verge outside her house and arrange them in tall jugs in the kitchen. It looked wonderful, as it would.

I was very influenced by Sue- it was her who introduced me to Country Living Magazine and, more importantly, who showed me a more relaxed way to parent. She hates computers so I doubt she will read this.

Does anyone else have flowers that remind them of specific people?

The foxglove in the photo is a variety called "Elsie Kelsie", a sport of the native white foxglove with a very dark mark for the bees to see how to get into the flower.

Baby boots

What is it about baby shoes that is just so CUTE???

A couple of days I mentioned that I was embroidering some baby boots - here are the finished versions.

They are for a baby born about 10 days ago - his parents have just aquired chickens - hence the pecking chicks on the fronts of the shoes.

They are made in vintage linen and have been great fun to work out.

I have a Japanese craft book with lovely baby shoes in it but none of them looked very practical as they are more like adult court shoes and I suspect that they would fall off on first outing.

I based these on those lovely leather baby shoes that don't fall off at all.

A frippery perhaps but there is something about new babies which encourages such things.

How to - Part 1

I have been meaning to add a kind of "how to" series onto the website. Today I have finally got my act together with time, flowers, space, camera and (probably most importantly) Sally asking questions about when exactly I was planning to get it done.

So here we have a very easy table centre - the instructions are here - it doesn't have to be in a pewter goblet, any small vase will do, and it doesn't have to be sweet peas.

Have a go and let me know how you get on. I'd love suggestions as to what "How to" s people would like. I was so overwhelmed by the number of e-mailed photos of poppies after my poppy tips!

Free Stuff - Fritillary seeds

The snakeshead fritillaries have now got ripe seedheads with lots of seed stacked inside - if anyone wants some free of charge let me know by e-mail snapdragonjane@yahoo.co.uk and then send a stamped addressed envelope to Jane Lindsey, Sunnyside, Gartacharn Road, Balfron Station, G63 0NH. Mark it with what you want as I'm a bit dippy.

Snakeshead fritillaries like damp soil in either sun or shade - they will grow in grass but I would clear them patches of soil to get them started. Christopher Lloyd suggested growing them amongst Gunnera and other plants that are late into growth. I used to have some amongst the rhubarb for the same reason.

Connections

Connection is the word that we would have inscribed above the door in Snapdragon's imaginary shop. It is the word at the core of what we aspire to do. Connect with the seasons, with the soil, connect with our customers, with the community. Only connect. This blog is a symptom of that quest.

Yesterday Carolyn wrote a very astute comment on my post about the demise of the Country Living Scottish Fair, questioning whether handmade was enough of an intrinsic value in itself.

It was a comment that made me think - because I am very vociferous about the fact that the similar catch all "organic" covers a multitude of sugary sins. I think that she is right - why do I get worked up about the need to preserve the hand made in Britain?

If I want to buy a salad bowl why do I go to the local craft gallery rather than Habitat? If I wanted to buy a doorstop why Primrose Hill rather than Cath Kidston?

And I think that it stems from this basic need for connection - connection at some level to a discernable human maker.

I do not feel comfortable buying from chain shops - I was in Edinburgh shopping yesterday and was very put off by the impersonal nature of the shops. The place where I did buy ( a party dress from East) was largely because of a wonderfully engaging member of staff. When I do part with my money it tends to be either in craft or antique shops.

I don't really know where this post is going - I think it is very hard to justify the allure of the handmade using pure logic. Yet it seems that, like lighting an open fire, growing your own vegetables or making jam, there is something more, something unmeasurable. All these things, if judged on a strict value for time and money basis, would probably fail, yet they are the parts of life that give me connection and are therefore, for me, beyond value.

That is how I feel about the hand made (though not all handmade) and the reason that I think it is worth fighting to promote.

I would be very interested to hear what items people value as hand-made and which they don't.

Thanks again for all your comments and e-mails.

Not quite the golden egg you would think.

Last week I got a letter from Upper Street Events who run the Country Living Fairs to say that they would not be having a Fair in Scotland next Spring.

It has turned out not to be an viable event for them.

It is a strange thing - talk to the stall holders and they feel that they are paying too much for their space, talk to the customers and they feel that the ticket price is too high, talk to the organisers and they say that they cannot make a profit on the event.

Perhaps there are not enough people in Scotland/North of England to justify the event - certainly, speaking to people who do both the London and the Glasgow Fair there are far fewer people at the Scottish event, spending far less per person.

That is perhaps the rub.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who had just bought a beautiful quilt from a catalogue specialising in Fair Trade goods. It was a lovely piece of work - the pieces had been carefully toned and my friend had bought it because of that, but also because it had been made by someone being paid properly for the work. She felt that she paid about a £70 premium for the good feeling that she has buying Fair Trade.

How many people would (or perhaps also could afford to) do that?

The Country Living Fair tries to reflect the magazine - to have a high proportion of stalls selling hand made, locally sourced, high production cost items - whether that is bags made from vintage materials or hand made jewellery.

The problem is that the price of those goods reflect the fact that they take time to make. With the Scottish Fair what seemed to happen was that each year there were fewer and fewer of these specialist stalls as too few people bought from them and they did not cover costs. Gradually stalls importing mass produced jewellery, enamelware, trinkets and so on began to dominate. Even the stalls which sold handmade items began to supplement with bought in goods, which were cheaper and therefore easier to sell. This applies to me as much as anyone else - whereas everything bar some hyacinth vases was made by me in the "home section" of my stall, there were pots and hand tools in the "garden" bit which were bought in - and available at another stall in the hall.

There were approximately 12,000 visitors to the Scottish Fair - that means to cover costs on a small stall you have every single person who comes in that door spend 30p with you. That is very high indeed. No wonder so many stallholders - with lovely stalls - hardly make a profit.

I really don't know what the answer is - if I could change one thing about our consumer society I would have people buy less but spend more time and money on their individual purchases. This Primark, disposable society depresses me. People look at a hand made object like a basket and think that it is expensive, if they began to think of the time taken to make it and what hourly rate they think would be fair, I expect that it would suddenly seem a great bargain. -

A Christmas Fair has been suggested for October 2008 and I hope that that comes off and that people use it as an excuse to get all their Christmas presents in one handcrafted, unique, happy shopping day.

I would be interested in hearing what people think from a customers' point of view.

Balmy balmy weather

At last we have the warm balmy air that the half hardy annuals need to start growing.

This has been a very peculiar and rather difficult year as far as flower growing goes. The very hot April brought on tulips very fast and they flowered in a great lump of colour over two and a half weeks rather than 6. The very cold wet May delayed all the flowers that should have taken over from them an for a few weeks, until the alliums emerged we were scrabbling around for flowers to sell.

The seedlings I planted out a few weeks ago - cornflowers, cosmos, snapdragons, sunflowers - all seem to have stayed still until this week (unfortunately not something I could say about the weeds) but in the past 3 days of hot clammy weather they have doubled in size and finally look as if they might turn into proper plants.

I am turning into a proper farmer with my ability to complain about the weather whatever it is. Next year I wonder about starting the seedlings off under tunnel hoops until the weather warms. We really have such a short growing season here it may be the only way in a chilly spring. That said - I really don't want the cutting garden to look like a strawberry field with chenilles of plastic glinting in the sunshine.

This poppy is Papaver orientale "Manhattan", a stunner if ever there was one.

I'm not sure the food was that good . . .

One of the advantages of being the first of our peers to do the whole " settle down, get a house, have kids, move to the country" thing is that we have a supply of friends and family who, in return for a good meal and some booze, are happy to help with lifting, shifting and general hard labour.

This weekend was one of those occasions. I have a thing about corrugated iron - a large part of the attraction of the van is that it is corrugated, for the same reason I would love a shepherd's hut. The older, more patinated the iron the better.

For the past few months, Euan and I have been discussing the need for a shed - somewhere to move the junk from the garage, somewhere to store tools sensibly, somewhere for the lawn-mower so that it doesn't block the entrance to the polytunnel.

We had looked at wooden sheds but they all looked a bit "kitty" and were really out of our budget anyway.

Then we saw this on e-bay - a large shed/barn in Stirling in very lovely corrugated iron. Euan spent the week of "watching" drawing up plans and costing van hire, notifying our helpers that they should be on call.


We "won" it, hired the van and Euan, John and Peter went off to demolish the shed, break it up into salvagable bits and bring it back here.

I think that they may think very hard about whether they ever want to visit for the weekend again.

Euan is going to transform this van of bits into a lovely useful shed with a tunnel where we can hang the washing when it rains.

poppies - free to a good home

I have decided to get rid of these pale pink Oriental poppies - I want to be able to sell the darker, dusky pink "Manhattan" in bud without worrying that they will turn out to be a different colour when they come out in the vase.

So these 3 plants are free to a good home (buyer must uplift) - they would look beautiful in a border with catmints, artemesias and roses - one plant has more picotee edges than the other.

I got the original plants from Sue Bell at Floreat Plants but have lost the label so I can't remember the name.

Drop me a line - snapdragonjane@yahoo.co.uk if you fancy them - first come first served.

The weather today is fabulous - the first day that I have been able to garden in bare feet.

Daisy doll - Mark 63

When the girls were younger we had a book of miscellaneous bedtime tales - my favourite was a one called Ruby. I can't remember the author but the story was about the adventures of some toys - led by the eponymous Ruby - who escaped from the reject bin at the toy factory and eventually found happiness by being adopted by a little girl.

They were obviously paying attention to their bedtime stories as the girls' bedrooms are now full of mutanty dolls - scooped from MY reject bin. Dolls with fat heads, dolls with thin heads, dolls with backwards shoes, dolls with felt hair (that did NOT work), dolls whose faces turned out to be really really scary.

I am amazed that I have actually persevered with this - I am not patient by nature - but here we have The Finished Daisy Doll.

Her body is made from vintage French linen and wool gingham with vintage ticking shoes; her titian locks are the jute string I use to bind my sweet peas; her reversible dress is a Liberty print with gingham as the alternative.


My idea with the dolls was to, as I have mentioned in the comments to my last post, make something that could be customised, either as a bridesmaid present or just a really nice present to a little girl. I could match hair colour and style (within reason), eye colour, perhaps even a favourite dress. I would love to have a go at making one as a copy of a bridesmaid's dress.

I do like this red headed girl though - very Scottish - I would have loved long wavy red hair.

She has been sitting in the shop today and has received lots of lovely complements (just look at her blushing) - I need to work out timings and costings before she can go on sale.

An excuse for a play about - wip

At the week end I was asked whether I made rag dolls. I had a material rabbit with me on my stall at the Green Gallery opening that sold encouragingly fast, so I said that I would give it a go.

So this week has been a parade of prototypes - and my girls are now proud owners of a series of slightly wonky versions, rejected because their faces were too fat or because, as Katie said, "Mummy are her feet meant to be backwards?".

I think that I am now getting somewhere and the photo is of the latest prototype - there are some changes to make - everyone preferred an earlier version's hair and I need to work out a better solution for the clothes.

I want the finished doll to be quite old fashioned looking - like those early C19th wooden dolls with their painted on hair and secretive faces but I also want her to work as a dress up doll so that her clothes come off and she can have alternative wardrobes - perhaps a ballet tutu.

I also want her to have outsize hands so that she is easy to hold hands with (perhaps not quite as large as this prototype).

Her name will be Daisy - in homage to the Karine Polwart song that seems to be on constant play here. Perhaps she shall have red hair, perhaps I will work out how to make her dungarees. Perhaps I will stop faffing about and actually make a final version . . .

Busy bees

This week Sally and I have been getting our fingers out and buzzing all over the place to let people know we are here. It is something we should have done 3 weeks ago.

When I began to sell from the house 2 years ago we had a very specific group of people who came each week - we were on the routine run between the Friday farmshop at France Farm and Killearn jumping beans. They were largely people that I knew socially through toddler groups and their friends.

A couple of weeks ago I began to notice that we no longer get this 11 am rush, so on Friday Sally and I sat down to think about the whys and wherefores, going through all the ex-11 am regulars. Some now come later on the way back from the afternoon school run - their children have simply outgrown toddlerhood. Others have returned to full time work and are not about at all on a Friday. Some have extended their maternity leaves, or returned to college, or taken up some arty non-paying job, they are down a wage and without cash to spend on flowers except for special occasions.

It all made me realise that I have been too complacent - we are always generally busy so I haven't been thinking about who our customers are and how we can continue to get them coming back. We have done a big effort on leafleting neighbouring villages to recruit a new generation of those toddler Mums and have our thinking caps on about how we can be more convenient for the rest.

I am very bad at this sort of thing, so it is a good job that I have Sally working with me. I would be the man with the better designed mousetrap waiting for people to beat a path to the door.

Repeating the pattern?

When I was growing up my Mum, like many women tried to find piece work that would fit in with being at home after school and in the holidays - she did B&B, she painted pegs to look like soldiers and highland dancers, she helped organise play schemes but most consistently she made toys for a local craft shop.

My clearest memories of Mum before she took up antique dealing are of her sitting each evening in front of the wood burner with a willow basket full of half made animals waiting to be hand finished.

Recently I have been drawn to making toys again - and I am looking back to patterns from the 60s and 70s, probably quite similar in style to the patterns copied from magazines in my youth. This cute pony is my favourite at the moment - made in soft suede effect fabric with felt mane and tail he is just the right size and squashiness for a small hand.

I wonder whether this is a form of broodiness - my girls are growing up fast and are not as attached to soft toys any more (though they pleaded for, and got, all my prototypes for the toys I am working on at the moment). I don't intend to have another baby - perhaps this sewing soft things is a displacement activity (though if you ask me professionally I will spout that I want to develop a children's section for the website)

Scotland's Garden Show

Today I met a friend at Scotland's Garden Show at Ingilston. She has suggested that we do a show garden there next year and we were there to see exactly what was involved and decide whether it would be a good idea.

To be honest I was really disappointed - there were hardly any show gardens and most were quite derivative with plants stuffed in so that they looked like a garden centre shopping trolley after a colour co-ordinated shopping spree.

I was rather glum and hot footed it over to the floral hall where the nurseries exhibit. And there - lo and behold - was the innovation, high quality construction and beautiful planting that was missing in the outdoor show gardens. Unfortunately the lighting isn't great within the hall and I didn't have my big flash so the photos are really bad but this garden was by far my favourite. It is part of the Binny Plants Stall and is a co-operative venture with the Biggar based garden design and construction company Landmarkers (LandmarkersScot@aol.com) and the metal artist Andrea Geile.

Binny Plants is one of my favourite nurseries - they grow their plants well and hard, they don't feed them junk to puff them up for shows and as a result they transplant well into the rigours of a Scottish garden. Their paeonies are second to none for the Scottish garden.

The garden was a gently tiered construction of rusted steel and drystoned slate with a sheet of vertical water at the back and beautiful, effective, natural, zippy and eminently copyable planting throughout. The colours were dark reds, purples and whites like many of the stalls - why fight against nature? - but had a vibrant streak of bright orange which sparked the whole composition up.

Many of the plants that I coveted - like this Troillus x cultorum "Cheddar" had already sold out but I have them written down in my notebook for next year.

This garden made my day. I'm just sorry that the photos are so bad.

The greenhouse today

Just a quick post today with photos of the greenhouse and the flowers etc. for sale today.

My favourite flowers are anchusa dropmore - a great deep glowing blue which mixes well with the deep pink chrysanthemum "duro" and red astrantias.

The other photo shows cushions and toys on the vintage french metal cot.