Morning sun in the garden

After my last post – on enjoying the evening sun and appreciating the garden rather than working in it like a maniac – Pauline from Lead up the Garden Path (hi Pauline) said that she did most of her photography in the mornings. Her shots are lovely, and even though I don’t have her motivation – midge avoidance – I thought I’d give it a go. So out I went, before even having a cup of tea.

The house faces west, and the garden runs round it on the east, south and west sides; the north side (phew) is on the lane running up the hill. Because the hills/mountains/whatever – the Rhinogs, anyway, and the other hills running between the interior and the coast – are to the east of me it takes time for the sun to get high enough to shine into the garden. The first areas in direct sunlight (7.30 today, seven thirty, and that’s at midsummer) are parts of the meadow and the veg patch. Of late I’ve been rather ignoring the veg here, but let me celebrate the golden mangetout,

beautifully lit by the morning sun, which has flowers as pretty as any (almost any) sweet pea. Plus the mangetout – which are pale yellow rather than golden – are delicious; none have made it into the kitchen so far because they make an ideal wandering-around-the-garden snackette.

In the meadow the early sun picks out things which merge into the background later on. Some of the self-heal is enormous, for instance, and until this morning I’d not really noticed that. The ox-eye daisies I can’t miss but they seem to welcome the morning sun, unfolding as they do so:

One effect of the very focused angle of light at this hour is that backgrounds can be very dark. This really makes some things stand out, like the Verbascum chiaxii album, which is much better this year than last:

What a great plant that is. Must get more, different varieties…

By this point I was in desperate need of tea and toast, so I retreated inside and let the sun rise higher up. Another hour, and it had cleared the tree tops as well as the hills and the houses above me, and started lighting up the middle garden. And my unfortunately deep pink bench (‘damson’, my arrrse), which I still haven’t got round to repainting. Ho hum. Turn away from the bench, and there’s this:

Some overgrown cineraria plants which I meant to pull out and didn’t quite get round to removing. OK, they are over a metre tall; OK, I didn’t plan for this colour – but I like it.

In the bottom garden more plants spring into prominence, and another which shouldn’t be flowering where it is currently flowering is this sidalacea. I dug it up and moved it. Oh yes I did. It’s flourishing in its new home. But I think I missed a bit, as the morning sun clearly highlighted:

It’s hiding behind the ginkgo. Hello, plant…

and hello other things I’d missed. I am, for instance, going to be harvesting my first artichoke,

…um, providing nothing else harvests it before I do, that is. This is the one veg which has found its way into a flower bed, for the simple reason that it’s a perennial and looks good there. But I love artichokes and they’re not that easy to get hold of round here. By my rules – grow things which are either expensive to buy, difficult to find or which taste much better straight from the soil – I ought to have more of these. But where could I put them? Hmm.

The grasses are doing well, and the Pennisetum rubra is flowering away – I’d forgotten how cute it is, like furry red rabbit tails. Hm, not very much like rabbit tails, but hey.

If I hadn’t gone prospecting into the garden at this hour, I’d never have managed to get the sun behind one of my red rabbit tails. (I keep almost mis-spelling that as ‘tales’ – Red Rabbit Tales, perhaps a Soviet translation of Little Grey Rabbit?)

Clearly time for more tea, but before anything else I had to get the tape measure out.

I grow good foxgloves. That’s not boasting; it’s a statement of fact – they like it round here and flourish all over the place with no encouragement at all from me, nor any exercise of skill (controlling the ******s is where the skill comes in). So I thought I’d add a bit of alternative colour and grew some white ones from seed. Wasn’t sure they’d flower this year, but they have.

Yerrsss, as Jeremy Paxman would say. That’s a roof. Well, it’s a bargeboard. It’s the side of the chapel store at the bottom of my garden, and it’s quite a bit taller than I am, even at this point in the slope. The foxglove is over 2 metres tall, plus it has a kink in it where it got stuck under the bargeboard and decided to grow sideways.

I think it’s something to do with midsummer – well, it is Midsummer Eve and foxgloves are a ‘fairy plant’ in the folk tradition. Maybe druids are involved. I’m surrounded by neolithic monuments, too – perhaps the foxglove is trying to see Ynys Enlli on the horizon, over the roofline (quite a few local megalithic monuments are lined up on that).

So happy solstice from the servant of the Mighty Foxglove – best to keep the Fair Folk happy, especially as the foxglove of fate is still growing – and a happy summer to us all!