Forget me nots

After my father's death, sixteen years ago, I was helping my mother to tidy the garden.  I dug up a clump of forget me nots and brought them south to my own garden.  Never was a flower better named.  For several springs after that, they engulfed the whole garden.  Now, I have them tamed to specific areas, where they drown out all rivals.

This is certainly an amazing season for blossom.  Here, the two espaliered pears facing each other in our walled garden.  At the base of this one a clematis, Madame Grange, is making another bid for life.  The harsh winter seems to have kick-started everything rather than killing it off.

A viburnum in full flower, threaded through with a clematis Montana.  the second picture shows some of the many insects attracted by its heady scent.

Finally, an image of our allotment plate. As a child, I lived in a farmhouse which had been in my father's family for more than one generation.  My great-grandfather, who was described in his obituary as a "dalesman of the old school," was  bookish, perhaps because he had crippled himself as a yourng man. The story was that he was scything the grass in the orchard when he cut his own Achilles' tendon.  There being no doctor to hand, his mother sewed him up with a sewing needle and thread.  Thereafter he walked with two sticks.   The attic at our farm was full of books which he had collected, and which amazed us as children. 

Also up there were two plates made by embedding fragments of broken china into cement on a tin plate base.  When we kept finding pieces on our allotment, it occurred to me that I could make such a plate myself - this is the result.