Pic of the week – starts now!

Happy New Year! Here’s hoping that 2022 brings us a bit more fun that the last year did…

As I’m trapped indoors by admin jobs, sleet and snow, I thought I’d resolve to try to be more regular with my blog this year and also try to capture more photos of flowers in order to have them on file for a new photo calendar for 2023. With the best of intentions, I’m aiming to post a favourite photo each week – why not start with high ambitions even if it slips to pic of the fortnight or month by the time the growing season kicks off in March! That’s the problem with one woman banditry, there’s only so much of me to go round!

I snapped this pic of hellebores (or Christmas roses) after I’d gone round the house putting away Christmas. With a view to winter month calendar photos, I thought I’d better capture an image before these plants get evicted from the charity shop glamour of their metal vessels and are released into the wild to make a new life for themselves in the garden. I bought the plugs very reasonably from a garden centre in early December, planted them into old tankards and my favourite metal jug and left them in the cold greenhouse until I needed them to decorate my Christmas table. Since Christmas dinner, they’ve been decorating my hall table and downstairs loo, but I think once the current bitter cold snap passes, it’s time to put them back in pots in a cold greenhouse to reacclimatise them to the semi-outdoors and then pop them into spaces in the garden to establish. It’s lovely having the same hellebores in the house for weeks rather than days, so potted plants in a cool room are definitely a more reliable way to achieve longevity for these tricky beasts.

The great thing about Christmas roses indoors is that they can be enjoyed up close and don’t get decimated by slugs as they tend to do in the flower border. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed their company for the past few weeks and it’s been lovely to have signs of life in the house when the garden is mainly populated with signs of winter demise. Looking forward to more candidates for photography appearing over the coming weeks, and to playing with my camera when the weather is too miserable to get outside!