I’m home, and from our kitchen window I can see tulips, Spanish bluebells, rhubarb, saxifrage and (almost) alliums brightening up the communal backgreen. It’s one of those rainy sunny windy everythingy days and the greenery simply shines. Even I, hopeless at finding and arranging flowers for Cathy’s Monday vases, can’t fail to create something today.
Directly outside our window is a hedge of fat, juicy honeysuckle, putting on its usual wonderfully exaggerated display. It’s the healthiest, happiest plant in the garden. On the tenement wall, hidden within the honeysuckle’s wild locks, is our boiler flue, and it’s my theory that the honeysuckle’s exuberance is fuelled directly by the carbon dioxide given off into its midst.
I added two little saxifrage flowers, three fronds of tatting fern, and a couple of stems of tiny feathery white flowers that I found in the border by the wall, which lend a delicate stroke to the whole. They might be a weed, or something sown by one of my neighbours, who knows?
The jug was from a charity shop. Standing guard is Bismarck, while an etching of Edinburgh by my cousin provides the backdrop. Do take the time to visit Rambling in the Garden to see Cathy’s fabulous arrangement and those of all the other garden bloggers who have joined in this week.
Edinburgh Garden Diary 
Sounds a lovely view and what a pretty collection for your vase, love the photography and natural light you have.
Thank you Julie. I do prefer to use natural light, and with a monopod and high ISO it’s possible to take sharpish pics even late on in the day.
What a beautiful vase showing off the honeysuckle…can’t wait for mine to bloom soon….I like the free style of the arrangement. Quite lovely!
Thank you Donna!
I am envious of your honeysuckle – mine isn’t even in bud yet. Lovely vase.
Yes, early for honeysuckle here too – and yours is indeed fat and juicy like you say so how lovely to see it featured in a vase. Thanks for sharing ps the Edinburgh etching look interesting…
Love honeysuckle! I’ve grown some from cuttings and await their first flowering, no sign yet.
Good luck with those flowers then! I was thinking of taking cuttings of this one myself…
Lovely luminous images of your vase. I love honeysuckle but I’ve found it doesn’t last long in a vase, do let us know how long yours lasts.
Day one… still ok! But let’s see how it goes from here on…
I didn’t know honeysuckle doesn’t last in water. That’s sad as I plan to cut some of my own new (and first) honeysuckle to bring the lovely scent indoors. Well, even if it only lasts a day or so it will be worth it for the fragrance. How pretty yours looks with the little saxifrage. Now that’s something I’d never have thought of cutting.
Nice to see a corner of The Cousin’s grand Edinburgh picture. Having just a little bit makes one focus on the detail. Perhaps we could have another corner next Monday? I think the whole picture features somewhere in your blog.
Yes, I think it does… in the post about the cut hydrangeas, which are still gracing the other end of the same mantelpiece!
Your honeysuckle might be new but it is not your first. There once was a honeysuckle in the corner of the yard, which you ruthlessly got rid of when I was about eight.
Fancy you remembering that. It was here when we moved in and was a miserable sickly thing, falling prey to mildew or aphids in monotonous sequence. It quite put me off getting another but I was seduced by a picture in a nursery catalogue. It is lonicera heckrotii Goldflame.
I have three other loniceras : lonicera japonica aureoreticulata – also here when we moved in, in the front of the border if you please. I moved it to a pot, where it has been ever since. It has pretty netted leaves and one year it produced dainty cream flowers with a beautiful scent; l nitida Baggesson’s Gold, a little bush with small bright leaves and l tragophylla, which is supposed to like almost complete shade. Opposite the dining-room window it ought to be very happy but has not flowered yet.