A Tale of Gardens, Gardening and Poppies.

 Hi everyone, I intended to get to my blog before now but the weather turned warm and as well as taking time out with hubby we have also been on gardening duty here at our retirement complex.

Bridgemere - somewhere new to us

We should have been shopping but took a detour to Dunham Massey on Saturday

The tale of the debacle since Covid began is a long one so I will try to keep it short. In fact I have tacked this on to the end of my post I case you don't want to read it - it is a bit of a rant.

My page has an old tag, the background was a napkin and had additional paper from my scrap box. The page background was stencilled with either inks or by spraying. I stamped an Aall and Create poppy by Bipasha on either side of where I wanted to put the tag and coloured them then stamped the Bipasha bird onto some card, coloured it and cut it out. Finally added some Tin Holt words

I am happy to be joining in with Aimeslee's 'Flowers' theme at Art Journal Journey (where I also have some catching up to do)

I would also like to add this to

We Love Stamping - where the theme for May is 'In the Garden'

Stamping Sensations where the theme is 'Anything stamped with the option of to Add a Stencil'

After Covid our gardening committee was depleted, so a decision was made to start again...with two original members  - me and our 101 year old garden expert. A meeting was held for interested parties and the rest of the committee was then comprised of one lady who joined because her husband wanted to do some gardening but knows very little herself, another lady who arrived with a huge bag of bulbs(this was back in September)because she thought everywhere was a bit drab in front of her window in Spring,(she was too busy and not really fit enough to do anything herself), one man who doesn't know what a dandelion is (or any other plants) but loves to dig, another man who has an illness with good days and mostly bad days but does know a lot about gardening, and a man who had his own garden, knows what he likes and went off in March to buy some bargain plants which have only just been planted(well, the ones that survived after sitting uncared for in pots for that length of time) 

Bulb lady resigned - had a bit of a fall out with a couple of other members - just after the bulbs were planted (not in nice clumps but in rows that didn't stand up to windy weather) and the husband of the other lady hurt his back digging up a nice piece of grass instead of planting the daffodils in the grass - which was done while we were away in September.

Hubby and I have cut back hedges that were making wheelchair access difficult, transplanted some spare plants that we spotted on our walks around the gardens, pruned some shrubs before the birds started nesting and recently been doing lots of weeding to stop plants choking. Man who likes to dig said he was amazed at how a whole area he dug over last year was full of really big weeds - it is - thistles, nettles etc, and I am going nowhere near it as I had told the committee that I thought it a waste of time when it was providing seed heads for birds and flowers for insects in the Spring/Summer and wasn't really seen by anyone.

I'm not sure how long my friend and I can carry on without getting cross - no matter what we say they don't listen - after all I'm a woman and he is very old is what they must be thinking.

We did persuade them to leave some of the lawn uncut for 'No Mow May' which no-one(apart from us) had heard of!

Okay rant over. This is probably part of the reason for my not sleeping so well, but I'm not giving up yet! 

Thanks for looking, Chris