Yesterday was breezy and sunny and the perfect day for me to change out some of the flowers in my garden. Our "yard" is only a small space in front of the cottage, so I do all my gardening in pots. I like to experiment a lot and mix things together, everything is very higgledy-piggledy. I buy what I like and plant it, that simple.Because my ivy has taken over in some of my pots my solution was to plant the plastic containers that flowers come in, into my flower pots. Thus, making switching over plants easier and providing me with a little more insulation than normal. Last year I had a geranium that lived through the winter in my garden and I am convinced it was because of his cozy double insulation. It was an idea that came to me while visiting Versailles a few years ago at Christmas. In Marie Antoinette's garden they had planted clay pots into the soil, leaving the rim just visible and had a mixture of primroses and ivy and other plants blooming away in the freezing weather.
To my delight I discovered the first olive on our potted tree. We have had him for 3 years now and every year we hope... but in planting pansies yesterday I peered through the branches and saw a little green olive no bigger than a pea beginning to form. Happiness.
The little grocery store in town always has a sweet collection of flowers in the store and yesterday I stocked up on pansies and miniature capsicum ( a fancy way for saying peppers) plants. The purple against the red looks very rich. They are the perfect plants and colors to move us from Fall into Winter. I find gardening therapeutic, making everything pretty, cleaning up the old to freshen up with the new. Gandhi said, "To forget how to dig in the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves."
Little, as it may be, I gain so much from my "garden", I would dearly miss not being able to play in the dirt on Saturday mornings and the smile that coming home brings to my face when I see such cheery colors canvased against our cottage.
(Image above by Mary Engelbreit)
