Bulbs

I took my car for its forty-thousand mile service this week. It can be an expensive business. Not the car - it seems to be behaving itself quite well, but the garage is near to a large garden centre and a major service leaves a lot of time in which to be tempted. I had been sent a flyer in the post of the latest gardening offers, (they know a sucker when they see one). They were advertising a white tulip with fringed petals called 'Swan Wings', three packets for the price of two. Irresistible! 

 Everyone else must have thought the same because by the time I got there they had all been sold. I consoled myself a little in buying 'Madonna', white feather-petaled parrot tulips with streaks of green. But I am disappointed because I had already imagined a drift of swan wings across my garden next spring. 

I like a beautiful flower to have an equally beautiful name and I've resisted buying any number of lovely plants because their name seemed ugly or inappropriate. 

It's English summer weather today, dull, wet and windy. But I'm feeling quite smug because I harvested the onion crop while the sun was still shining. They are drying out nicely in trays in the greenhouse before being hung up and stored for winter. Some of the red onions had bolted so I chopped them up and cooked them with plenty of homegrown garlic and cherry tomatoes sprinkled with basil, to eat with pasta.