Flowering Herbs

Just outside our kitchen door we have an untidy collection of pots filled with herbs. I am lazy and like them nice and handy when I need to use them for cooking. I noticed today how they all appear to be in flower. I don't know if this is because I'm a really good gardener or a really bad one, but all flowers are welcome in our little garden - even dandelions, I love their sunny yellow heads - and I have been enchanted by my accidental flowers. 

Tiny, delicate white petals on the thyme...

a pale blue/lilac flower on the rosemary (I honestly had no idea rosemary flowered)...

...and the chives, which I adore. They are gorgeous in a jug in the kitchen, although they do smell a bit oniony.

The bees like them too.

And now to a bigger, showier version of the chives - alliums. These beauties make me proud and happy every time I look at them. I can't quite believe I grew something so startlingly pretty. This was the first year I planted them and I will plant them every year from now on.

We have absolutely loads of strawberry flowers and high hopes for a little crop of our own this year. 

And little figs! On the fig tree! This is the first time it has produced fruit and I'm rather excited. I'd given up on it to be honest.

And my little helper, Angus, watering his precious sunflower seed. He brought it home from nursery sometime in March or April and we've been tending to it's every need ever since. It's growing nicely and I already can't wait to see the smile on his face when it actually flowers. (I have back-up sunflowers in place, in case we kill that one.)

With every year that goes by I realise how much Bella and Angus like to watch things grow in the garden. Their excitement for tender, bendy rhubarb sticks and strawberry flowers is genuine and infectious and it can only lead me onwards and upwards.

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Thank you for your wonderful, wonderful comments on my last post. Writing about memories can be tricky as they often only resonate with those to whom the memories belong, and those they can share them with. But it seems that lying in bed as a child on a light summer night is something we all share and remember with equal fondness. Sounds and smells also conjure up the same vivid recollections. Pulp's Common People takes me right back the student union in 1996 and the sound of seagulls recalls day trips to Brighton. Give me the smell of mud at low tide and I'm straight back in my middle school playground, only a half a mile from the harbour, and cut grass equals school playing fields at lunchtime and sneezing fits from the pollen. And the smell of tomatoes, freshly picked, still attached to the vine...well, I can feel the heat and humidity of my Grandpa's greenhouse in seconds.