British Flowers Week - Like a kid in a candy shop

One of my "rules" is that I can pick from other people's garden, as long as I give something back in return. I had asked a friend if I could pick flowers from her garden today in exchange for a bunch of flowers. These wonderful friends are also wonderful gardeners. They don't have a huge garden but what they have, they have filled with an absolutely brilliant array of flowers and plants. So I felt a bit like a kid in a candy shop!

For my own bunch I picked Knautia "Macedonia", Eryngium, Coreopsis, Californian poppy (Eschscholzia californica) and some lovely grass.  

I moved this vase to the bar where it is absolutely perfect. You can see it from anywhere in the room and the silhouettes of the grass, the knautia and the erygnium is stunning from every angle especially with the backlight from the window. 

Two out of these five flowers I have tried to grow and failed. I once bought a knautia plant, accidentally hoed it out out and my seed this year hasn't come up. Californian poppies I have also tried to grow a few times and this time I have a few seedlings that seem to be doing okay. Eryngium, a perennial, I have just sown and it has come up, so who knows!


I also picked some verbena, which I just popped in a green vase. Sometimes the simple things are just beautiful on their own. 

















For my friend I made a posy with white pinks and sweet peas.













I also made her a large bunch of flowers with verbena bonariensis, lavender (her garden) and sweet williams, cornflowers, Achillea ptarmica 'Double Diamond' and Love-in-a-mist seed heads (all from the allotment).

With yesterday's and today's bunches filling three vases, I am sort of running out of surfaces. However, many of the flowers from last Friday are still going strong. I have put Friday's pictures of the two bunches below. I blogged about the one on the left on Monday. 

  

The roses and a few other flowers are gone and the poppies are now small seed heads, but  there is still enough left for another vase! So on the fourth day of British Flowers Week, this is my fourth vase!

Ps Interestingly some of the cornflowers have a blue-purple tinge. They were grown from seed that I saved from cornflower "black ball" last year, but obviously it has crossed with blue ones!