Coronavirus: Week Five

See What Is Blooming at Crooked Trail Farm This Month.

Adirondack chairs look great but how many cans of paint are needed for each chair?

In the language of flowers, lilies represent purity, royalty, devotion, and innocence.

No matter the time of year, freshly cut flowers will always bring a sense of joy and natural beauty into any room. Fresh bouquets in water — whether grown ourselves or gifted — are normally at their best for a couple of weeks, but blooms will be fleeting and are usually thrown away once they start to lose their colour and wilt. So, a question that I’m asked a lot is simply — ‘How can I make my flowers last longer?’ The answer lies in the art of drying flowers — a craft that I’ve been immersed in for the past seven years. Dried floral arrangements will bring a different aesthetic to interiors compared to fresh — they are not for everyone — but if you like the look, you can very easily prolong the beauty of your flowers by months — even years — by creating striking arrangements that celebrate floral structures and will add interest to mantelpieces, dining tables, sideboards — you name it — throughout the seasons.

Daylilies are in the genus Hemerocallis. In flower meaning lore, daylilies represent forgetting about the past and faithful bonds as the flower only lasts one day.

Hi there! We have been working tirelessly on our backyard to create our outdoor oasis. There’s a lot of design planning and diy projects going on for this makeover. We have been making great strides and can’t wait to show you the progress. You can see where we started and how we built our pergola in my previous posts. Today, I want to share with you our DIY large cement planters that my husband built using plywood and cement.

I stenciled my front porch to make it look like brick and I love it! It took one weekend and it was totally worth it!

“In June, as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.” ~Aldo Leopold~

Lockdown made this a familiar walk for us all. it's one of the few which takes you to a destination instead of around in a circle and has more of a sense of a journey as a result. Familiarity doesn't mean there aren't any surprises — we were delighted to find extensive bluebell woods either side of the track once we were close to the Bowood Estate. I thought I'd found all the local, walkable bluebell woods during the past two years, and I'm delighted to be proven wrong.There was plenty of wild garlic too — walks there during the rest of May are going to be quite pungent!May the month of May be as delightful for you, whatever's happening in your neck of the woods.

What we have been eating:

So, how are we all doing? Thank God I’m already divorced (said in full knowledge my ex-husband would say the same thing about me so it’s a fair comment).

The season of late sunsets, swims in the sea and garden parties, summer is a joyous time, full of late sunsets, refreshing swims in the sea, blue skies and balmy weather. Also attendant to these warmer months are the myriad flowers on display no matter where you go: there are sweet-smelling peonies in Tesco, hydrangeas flowering on front lawns and ruby red zinnias sprouting in every park and field. To make the most of the the season's floral bounty, we've rounded up five simple flower arrangements perfect for a summer bouquet from the House & Garden archive.