Daily Archives: August 3, 2024

Hands off me Echinops’ pal

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Influenced by (Mike and) Julia‘s brilliant photographs from Crete and from their garden posted earlier today, we walked around the back and took some snaps. The echinops (Globe Thistle) that didn’t flower last year as they were only small plants, are now flowering and attracting many bees.

Remember we’re thinking of possibly producing a Weeds up to me knees “alternative to the Countryfile calender” so please send us your photographs. If it does go into production we will of course be doing events like opening supermarkets and after-dinner speaking to bored business people around the country and we will take all the contributors with us on a coach. If we pull some strings we may even all get to meet the great John Craven (who once danced on a Blue Peter Christmas Special we seem to remember).

We read somewhere that there’s been a marked downturn of pollinating insects this year but it did seem it was all go on that front earlier. We didn’t know that the echinops are very popular to the buzzing species and even now at 6pm the bees are still at it fighting for the best spot on the golf ball type flowers. Have a good Saturday night!

Meanwhile, back in the Midlands…

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Thanks again to Mike and Julia for the pics of their back garden when they returned from their holiday. “We now have two sunflowers and those purple things in our wild patch are chicory. The flowers close up at night when the bees have gone home.” Brilliant Mike!What we love here is they’ve got an olive tree, called Olive (of course). She’s in the top laft hand corner of the picture and as Mike says “seems to be benefiting from the high temperatures”. Excellent!

And here’s a great rich coloured clematis and a “Ms Mars” sunflower, all looking wonderful. That’s it with holidays when you come back you will notice the difference in your garden.

Hey, what gives in Crete?

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Cheers to Mike and Julia for sending us some excellent horticultural snaps taken on their holiday to Crete. It was mighty hot out there they told us and it’s something else to think that plants actually survive the intense heat out there. The pomegranite tree is looking great and one we’d love in our garden.

Do enjoy these great pics.

We think they’ll be a follow up to this post as Julia has taken a good few pictures and they all look great! The above is the crimson bottlebrush that we have in the front garden and hasn’t really done all that well this year and we imagined it was to do with the heat. Thinking about it, we imagine Crete is possibly on average, a little bit hotter than Forest Hill.

Great photographs Julia and we’ll do a part two in a couple of days time as they are all great. Thanks for sending the holiday pictures as it’s great to see what grows elsewhere in the world. Do send us your worldwide plant pics to one deck pete at gee mail dot com.