The scraps came from Joe’s aunt, Ruth, who very generously gave me a large box of
them when she cleared out her stash a couple of weeks ago.

I spent a very satisfying afternoon playing a sort of pelmanism with the jumbled scraps, and I discovered that a lot of them are actually samples – ready-cut rectangles which are, of course crying out to be made into a quilt. And as the cutting part was what drove me demented when I made Bea’s quilt (which I blogged about here and here), I feel as though Matilda’s quilt, which keeps stalling, has just made an awful lot of progress without any effort on my part.

It’s also nice to know that this quilt, when I finish it, will be the ultimate family heirloom –  the scraps having come from her great aunt, sewn together by her mother, and if she’s lucky it’ll be on her bed before she’s started a family of her own. Though given that the last quilt was around twelve years in the making, and Matilda turns thirteen next Monday, it might be touch and go.

Apart from the cat and the dog, I have the kitchen to myself and I can potter in the garden with a cup of tea in hand undisturbed.

I had planned to pick some roses, but they looked so pretty peeping through the bronze fennel and the nepeta that grows around them, I found I was only prepared to pick the blowsiest flowers, the ones that are close to going over, and of course the minute I did most of the petals fell off.

Fortunately some of them made it and a bleary-eyed child has just wandered into the kitchen wanting to know the source of the lovely smell.

Sorry if some of these shots are a little dark – to get really good photographs of a garden you need to get up an awful lot earlier than my 6.50 start. More like 5am. Then the light is perfect and you don’t end up with heavy contrast or bleached-out flatness.

Crystal Palace Radio Transmitter

Six years on and, to my horror, I find that I am now a tourist in the city that I called home for the first thirty-eight years of my life. Actually I still call London home, but it doesn’t always feel very familiar, as I discovered this week on a work-related whistle-stop visit.

The sense of being a stranger in town began the minute I arrived. As I faffed about trying to top up my oyster card, it occurred to me that my ineptitude would have driven the London-living me completely insane if I’d witnessed it. Next I found that the tube map in my head – something I had always taken for granted – seemed to have been erased. No longer necessary I suppose; God knows the storage space in my brain is pretty limited, but if I’d had a choice, that’s something I might have kept. And then there is the city’s skyline which looks different on every visit – Strata one year, Heron Tower the next and now the Shard glinting in the heat haze.

But some things remain reassuringly familiar: namely the general scuzziness of South London (and I mean that in the nicest possible way, always a fan of a little bit of grot), and the key bus routes of my childhood. My heart always leaps a little at the sight of the 137, the 37 or the 88 which, for some reason I always think of as the original Clapham Omnibus (as in the man on the Clapham Omnibus).

And on Wednesday morning I was transported back to my teenage years when I caught the number 3 to Crystal Palace. I don’t think I’ve been on this route since I was about 18, but nothing has changed, and as the bus wound steadily up the final hill before pulling into the bus station, I was delighted by the sight of the Crystal Palace radio transmitter - surely London’s answer to the Eiffel Tower.

I was in Crystal Palace to meet up with my friend the photographer James Balston, to discuss some projects and to visit a remarkable subterranean home that he is photographing and I am writing about. Below is a tiny taste of what we saw and the rest I’ll post later when it’s been published. Incidentally, James has a lovely blog here, which is dedicated to life high on the hill in SE19.

Interview over, I hopped back on the number 3 and from the front seat on the top deck I enjoyed the show as we sailed back down the hill towards the West End via Herne Hill, Brockwell Park, Brixton, Kennington, Westminster, Trafalgar Square and then the grand finale – Regent Street festooned with bunting and Union Jacks.

That’s until next spring when the tulip fever will take hold once more. But right now
it’s roses, and I am determined to get some more. It’s a shame these images aren’t scratch and sniff – she smells divine!

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that a) I haven’t posted much about my favourite piece of local graffiti, the squiggle man, and b) the fact that I hadn’t spotted this new version of him until this morning, when I did venture back to the local park.

It seems that he’s having a bit of a yellow and grey moment too. That’s when he’s not feeling green …

Or off on a skiing trip ..

This last photo was taken by my neighbour, Sarah, who knows about my obsession with Mr Squiggle, and couldn’t quite believe her eyes when she spotted him lurking near their hotel in Chamonix when they were skiing earlier in the year.

I like a little contrast along cuffs and hems, but for this project I decided to take it further and included the button band too.

The pattern is by Andi Satterlund and is free on ravelry here, and, if you are interested in such things, you’ll find the details for my project here. I’ve got plans for another one.

But on the downside, and it’s a downside that to my mind completely outweighs the upside, the slugs are out in force. I have been out each day, picking off the slimy blighters and flinging them in buckets of water or leaving them out for the birds. But still they keep coming, more and more of them.

To date they have claimed all my sweet pea seedlings – I now need to start again, but with the terrible sense that it is utterly pointless; they have destroyed an entire clematis, montana ’Warwickshire Rose’ (above) – every bud, flower, leaf and shoot has gone, just bare stems remain; I have lost most of my alliums, each one nothing more than a slimy stump.

The clematis was the biggest shock – stripped over the course of two days.

Slug pellets then. Never used them before. But from today it’s war.

According to my receipt from Peter Nyssen Ltd, I ordered ten different tulips: Black Parrot, Barcelona, Couleur Cardinal, Don Quichotte, Fantasy, Hermitage, Princess Irene (also known as Princes Irene – I think they are the same), Queen of the night and Rococo. Only one tulip, Black Parrot, failed to make an appearance – more of which later.

I’ll start with T. Malaika was the first tulip out (though initially I mistook it for Princess Irene, because they appeared in the wrong order). I planted it in two places in the garden – a deep metal container along with paperwhites and some alliums (which have yet to flower), and below, in the border where I clearly just shoved them in as I ran out of time. I think they worked well in both situations.

I will certainly order more Malaika for next year, and I’ll probably double the amount to 50. They looked beautiful in amongst the strappy leaves of the paperwhites, and they were lovely as cut flowers, either on their own, or in combination with Narcissus ‘Bridal Crown’, Hellebores and Hyacinth ‘Woodstock’, as you can see in this post here.

Back in November I wasn’t sure where I wanted to put most of the tulips. The garden still felt so new to me, I couldn’t be sure what would work in spring.

In the end I hedged my bets by planting all the tulips I was unfamiliar with, such as Malaika (random handful aside), Couleur Cardinal, Rococo and Fantasy, in pots so that I could move them around once I knew what they looked like. In the photograph above you can see Fantasy in the foreground and Couleur Cardinal behind.

Couleur Cardinal looked wrong from the start – all red and shouty and not really what I wanted. But of course when it came to moving the pots they were far too heavy. I was stuck with the loud red flowers at the bottom of the garden. It was quite a relief when I cut them all last week. So no Couleur Cardinal for next year.

Fantasy, however, worked a treat. It’s a slightly crazy flower, and not exactly what one would describe as being particularly elegant or tasteful, but I’ll certainly order more. I have an idea about combining it with Stipa arundinacea in the two large pots which I currently use as my experimental beds.

I put Rococo, another mad parrot, in old plastic pots which, in turn, I shoved into two galvanised buckets as I thought they would work best on their own. Although I was fascinated by their peculiarly twisted petals, I can’t say that I loved them – they kept making me think of sun dried tomatoes which, although delicious, I began to find slightly off-putting. Not one to repeat.

The rest of my tulips went into the patch at the bottom of the garden which I am planning to redesign this summer. Where there should have been a great drift of Black Parrot, there was instead a muddy, dog-shaped gap.

But apart from that I was lucky and Princess Irene, Hermitage, Queen of the Night, Don Quichotte and Barcelona all came up relatively unscathed. These combinations were more accident than design, the biggest accident being that both the pink tulips, Barcelona and Don Quichotte, and the two orange tulips, Princess Irene and Hermitage, were so alike as to be virtually indistinguishable.

Below is a view of the bed I filled with Barcelona and Don Quichotte, and I still have no idea which is which.

Although Princess Irene and Hermitage threw up similar issues, I was able to tell them apart as more emerged. Hermitage is a more fiery orange than Princess Irene. The photograph below is Hermitage with Queen of the Night and a very tragic, storm-bashed euphorbia, and below that is Princess Irene. Please, if anyone thinks I’ve muddled them up, do let me know.

It probably goes without saying, but all tulip fans should take the time to scroll through Jane Brocket’s tulip posts as she always has the most amazing selection in her garden, and  most of them are clearly named which is really helpful. Naomi at Out of My Shed has also posted some lovely photographs of her front garden with a mass of tulips – I do think planting them in large groups or drifts is the way to go if you have the space.

The tulips are coming to an end. This morning I picked the last of the Fantasy and
Queen of the Night, above. As Queen of the Night has a sleeker more compact form than any of the other tulips I grew, I could never quite bring myself to cut a full bunch as it would have meant picking them all. Instead I just picked two or three at a time and slotted them in with other tulips. With the parrots it was always possible to create a full-seeming bunch from only four or five flowers if I put them in a tight-necked vase.

I also picked all but the last pot of Rococo and the least storm-damaged of the T. Hermitage, T. Couleur Cardinal and T. Princess Irene. I’ve got them here on my desk, a welcome blast of colour when everything else looks so dull and grey.

So that’s nearly it for the home grown tulips. Until next year. And it seems only right to end this post with a photograph for my fellow Dead Tulip Fanciers…