Spring Gardens

Calthorpe Community Gardens

There’s an abundance of wonderful flowering shrubs, trees and plants around us at this time of year. Even in the heart of London – Camden, walking distance from King’s Cross railway station – Calthorpe Community Gardens hold a variety of plants and herbs. It was a joy last week when I was in London for RNA matters to walk out of my hotel and find this green lung within five minutes.

 

Magnolia, home

My husband is the gardener around our place and his spring garden is the moment when it’s at its most spectacular. The young magnolia tree was particularly beautiful this year.

 

Garden magnolia

On Friday, I walked across to the British Museum where I saw a great exhibition of art and artifacts made by the native peoples of the Torres Straits Islands. On the way I rested a bit in the gardens of Bloomsbury Square. I’ve been collecting photographs of daisies from various places to help advertise my upcoming Daisy’s Dilemma and Bloomsbury Square provided Daisies with added pigeons.

 

Bloomsbury Square Gardens

We have pigeons and they’ve stripped a cherry in next door’s garden of its fruit. They fly into it and grab at the thin twiggy ends of the branches with their feet. Several heart-stopping seconds of aerobatic antics later and they gain a perch. It would be funny, but in five weeks time they’ll be making the same hopeless landings in our blackcurrant bushes causing a lot of damage.

It’s great to walk the streets my heroine would have known. I stopped to admire a blue plaque marking the first terraced houses John Nash put up in the late eighteenth century. still standing and in good order they house a dental clinic today.

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