Edible But Beautiful

The garden is abuzz. A collection of bumblebees is clambering over the chive flowers - one clump has six on it. Over on the poached egg plants there are solitary bees and hoverflies. My worries about a lack of bees after the storm have been proved redundant. The clumps of flowers (edible and inedible) that I scattered around the garden among the vegetables and fruit are doing their magic and drawing pollinators to the garden. But of all the pollinators my favourite is the red-tailed bumblebee or as we call it in Gloucestershire the red-arsun. When I was a child I spent many of my summer days at a cottage under Humblebee Wood. It was idyllic, a place of sunshine, adventure and a laughter. It was a place of history with a Roman villa mosaic in a hut in a neraby copse and a Stone Age longbarrow overlooking the valley and it was a place of nature with fossil sea urchins in the fields and of course humblebees. Humblebee is the traditional British name for the bumblebee - humble being a

The garden has exploded in a mass of colours. The most vibrant of all the flowers are those of the crimson-flowered broad beans. No photo can do them justice, the colour is so rich and when the sunlight is behind them they glow red. This variety is so beautiful it could be grown in a flower garden. It also has a lovely scent and the bees love them. Crimson-flowered broad (fava) beans are a heritage variety, said to date back to the late 1700s. They definitely were around in 1831, featuring in a report by the Horticultural Society of London. The plants are shorter than the ordinary modern broad beans', but they are said to be less troubled by blackfly which is a blessing. I think next time I will plant them closer together or in a pot. As for the flavour I am happy to wait for the beans a while and enjoy the flowers.

The garden is really beginning to fill up with colour and flowers. This plant is the arctic raspberry that I grow in a container at the top of the steps entering the garden. It is delightful at the moment.  When I bought the plant last year I did not know what pleasure it would give me. It was cheap at The Range and sounded interesting so I took a bet on it. Having been restrained by a small pot, it was only a little thing when I bought it and looked overwhelmed by the container I put it in. But its growth took off and even gave a harvest of sweet deep red berries in its first year. It laughed at this year's cold winter, which was no surprise given it does indeed grow in arctic conditions, and now is in full bloom. The Russians call it the Prince of Berries and I agree.