Aquilegia time again

I walked around the garden with my camera yesterday, just to take that annual Aquilegia photos.  I have lots of these pale pink ones, in various flower formats.  I have introduced a few dark blue and pink plants up here for variety.

They are all in very poor soil here as it's mostly gravel and it's a mixture of sunshine and deep shade, but they thrive.

I did thin them out in the top of the stone garden but they soon go mad, self-seeding, again.

A lovely purply-blue.

This is one of my favourites, pink and the palest lemon.  Looking for a name I have fond Swan Pink  and Yellow . . .

A deeper pink which is a deeper shade still in bud.

Pure white with the yellow stamens.  You can see the greeny bud behind it.

This pale lilac pink one is pretty.

A Ruby Port with a Clematis style flower.

I have a lot of pale pinks (boring to me!) but they are all pretty.

The two tone nearly black with white is William Guinness and the red one is Ruby Port.

I think the blue ones are Blue Flamingo, and in the house I have a lovely pale blue one which got knocked over and trodden on - it was my only plant of this colour too! - so I won't get seeds from that this year as I had to put it in a vase to enjoy it.

Sorry for the blurry photo - I think this is Green Apple.

Not a good gardening day today as it is blowing half a gale. We spent much of yesterday repairing the stable door to what was Maggie's big loose box.  It was a job I had been asking Keith to do for years but had been deemed "unnecessary" but now he Has Time to do it, and so we lifted it off its hinges and set to work.  I deemed it necessary as it was just getting worse and worse and looked like we weren't keeping on top of the jobs that needed doing.  Getting 20 year old rusted-in screws out was not a fun job and cutting the rotten timber out without cutting through the door frame quite a challenge and the circular saw started to go off course towards the end so we didn't get a straight line!  But it's covered with a batten now.  I will show you a finished picture when I have it all painted which is probably a job for today, once we've put the bottom kicking bolt back on.

The green painted wood is pitch pine, a good 100 years old, and it came from the porch of a Dorset cottage.  We were on holiday and staying with our antiques friends Bryan and Mary at the time (it was their next door neighbour who was removing his porch so we asked if we could have the wood.)  It has been in a shed here ever since - in fact it was part of Keith's collection of "useful bits of wood" which would cost you a fortune to buy if you had to, and some of which (200 year old bits of oak and elm for instance) you would find very hard to source.  It was this "collection" which by then was in Maggie's stable, which prompted one idiot of a man who was viewing our house with his wife, to comment - in superior tones - "Oh, got a bit of a problem with hoarding have we?"  I wanted to HIT HIM!  Obviously someone who had never mended anything in his life. . .

Whilst I was helping Keith, I had a sudden urge to re-read Derek Tangye again.  I went inside and found this book - which was more or less where I expected it to be! and then found another of his "The Minack Years"which is a compilation of bits from all his books.  If you haven't read him, they are gentle reading and helped inspire my own "return to the country" plans.