“It was June and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.” – Maude Hart Lovelace.
I love the month of June, precisely for the reasons expressed in those two lines above; roses and sunshine. My garden is at its colourful and fragrant best around this time of the year and as we continue to live in restricted ways to combat the corona virus, it is a great joy to have time to actually sit and enjoy the fruits of my labour.
In previous years, I would plant the hanging baskets and tubs and feed and water them, and they would grow and become beautiful, but I had very little time to just enjoy them, because let’s face it, we all led very busy lives before this compulsory slow-down.
I have loved gardening since I was about 10 years of age, and my father suggested that I enter the children’s section of the local Tidy Towns competition.
This involved setting out a patch to specific dimensions in the flower bed in the back garden, turning the soil, planting and weeding and threading milk bottle tops on string to suspend above the bed to discourage birds from nibbling at my seeds. That strategy proved quite successful.
I wish I could have devised a formula to prevent my brothers and cousins from kicking footballs near my blooms!