Seasonal flowers – early June

Peony ‘Bartzella’, lupin, foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea), Balkan spurge (Euphorbia oblongata), columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris)

The rad thing about home-grown flowers is that you just cannot go wrong with them. You can combine the most clashing colours and, somehow, they always work. Today’s bouquet is a case in point. Doesn’t ‘yellow+pink+purple’ sound like a bad idea? Just imagine those colours combined in interior decor – it makes me shudder. But this bouquet? I love it.

Truthfully, when I made it, I was not thinking about colour combinations. I just went around the garden and picked everything that’s flowering at the moment.

The yellow peony is a variety I got from the nursery as a ‘thank you’ on top of my order years ago. It’s called “Bartzella’ and I wouldn’t have chosen it myself, despite the catalogue trying to persuade me it’s ‘highly sought after’. But I have since grown to love the huge yellow blossoms with red-tinted centres and their lemony fragrance. It also doesn’t hurt that this hybrid variety is very easy to grow, productive and has a long vase-life.

This year I have not sown any annual flowers (due to being too busy writing about gardening – isn’t that sad?), so I am relying on perennials and self-sown flowers for my bouquets. So far, so good.

What’s flowering in your garden right now?

You can read more about our peonies here.