Garden treasures...

Saturday was spent clipping and cutting back the hedge / shrubs from the front of the house down to the road and what a difference it has made.  It seems to have let so much more light in to the front of the house.

Sunday, I spent a little time out in the sunshine in our back garden and thought you might like to share some of the treasure I found there.

It seems to have been a good year for the roses although the rain seems to knock them down and the flowers have certainly taken a battering at times.

At the very bottom of our garden is a wild / back to nature area for the birds, and wild plants.  We have lots of hazel trees down there that make a canopy with bird feeders and nesting boxes and even have a bird hide made from a small garden shed [Jo calls it our 'love shack' but all I can say is how did she know?  :-)  ].  It is getting to the 'I need to be cut back and sorted' stage so before it gets cleared I wondered through the wilderness and snapped all the little hidden treasures amongst the nettles.

If you click on the picture you should be able to enlarge it enough to see just what wonderful treasures you can find in nature if you just look.

Half way down our garden is a love seat that our family bought us for our silver wedding anniversary....the idea being that Hubby and I can sit on the seats and enjoy a cuppa together but our little dogs have other ideas.

The second I sit down on the one side Wispa likes to jump up and sit on the table part and Rocky sits proudly on the other seat!!!

They are such little characters.

I hope you've enjoyed the peep into our garden treasures today.

Hugs,

Annie x

Colour from our garden....

I had a quick walk around our garden last night snapping a bit of colour to share with you.

It's not the best snap cos he didn't really want to pose for me but this is our visiting woodie feeding on the nuts literally just 4 foot from the shed I was standing in  :-)

These are a couple of the thistles in our wild area at the bottom of our garden....some,as you can see, are rather more planned than others  :-) The finches will enjoy these when they go to seed.

The veg garden is looking good too....here are the kidney beans now growing big enough for the picking and sharing....you need to help yourself Twiglet.  :-)

We have put a new obelisk for our everlasting sweet pea to grow up this year and it really seems to be enjoying it's new home

Wow.....look at my poppies now.....just my most fav flower.  They are such a stunning bright red at the mo.

And to finish off here's one to put a smile on every face.  Sunshine on a stem....cos there isn't much up in the sky here today so far.  Enjoy your weekend.

The treasures in the undergrowth....

At the very bottom of our garden we have a wild area with a bird hide and usually a couple of times a year it gets a good clear out so thought I'd share a few of the treasure we found.


This is a before photo so you can see that wild is a good description. [Yes, there is a bird hide in the back there somewhere!] The nettles are for the butterflies to lay their eggs on so even though we have removed most of them from along the path side we always leave a patch of these.



After a couple of hours of cutting back and clearing these are the after photos with some of the pretty flowers and plants we have saved from being strangled by the weeds.































This is what I look out on from the bird hide. We have a huge pile of old logs to encourage the insects and smaller wild life.







This is the after photo taken from roughly the same spot as before!
Our three dogs are still wondering where all the nettles and weeds went to :-) Oh and do notice they are all sporting their summer hair cuts now :-)