Post Comment Love 17-19 February 2017

Hello there and welcome back to another #PoCoLo and thank you for your kind words and sympathy for my dentist visit last week, it's definitely one place that many of us would rather not go. I'm heading there again on Monday to pick up my mouthguard so that should be fun, and hopefully a lot less traumatic for me.

If you were here last week, thank you - I will get to your post soon, it's been a bit of a week - and if you're new here this week, welcome. We're a friendly bunch and we hope you'll fit right in.

We had the weekend in Norfolk, and for a change wasn't quite so lucky with the weather. I was glad that I didn't take my bike, and was very glad of mum and dad's open fire it was a great way to keep warm!  My photo this week is of their poinsettia - a pink variety, which I'd expect - and still going strong and quite apt for Valentines week.

Valentines for us this year was a cosy affair, we both worked from home, and so spent most of the day opposite each other across the table tapping away at our laptops in companionable (almost) silence, and then cooked a vegetarian curry for tea, which we washed down with a bottle of Vouvray, from Vouvray.  

Lovely and civilised, and for a change MOH who is usually heavy handed on his keyboard, didn't rock the table at all.  I think that could be though that our new table is just a bit more stable than the previous one, but it was appreciated nonetheless, a true Valentines treat! 

Blogger Showcase: Suzanne from Chickenruby

This week our Blogger Showcase is #PoCoLo regular Suzanne from Chickenruby and you can find out more about Suzanne over on Morgan's blog.  But before you go, I'm going to tease you with some info you might not know about Suzanne, who has no idea how she discovered blogging other than needing more than 140 characters to express herself. Her first blog post was about her week as a dalek, which sadly she hasn't listed in her top 3 posts, which is a shame as I think it'd be a corker.  And she doesn't have biscuits, as they give her migraines, well who knew, I'd be devastated if that happened to me.

If you're not already connected to Suzanne, do take a moment to pop over to her social links and say hello.

Twitter  -  Facebook  -  Google+  -  Instagram  -  Bloglovin'

For me, it's lovely to feature one of our regular linkers, so if you link regularly and have thought about getting in touch with answers to our questions, please do, Morgan and I would be very happy to include you in a future Blogger Showcase.

An InLinkz Link-up

Hellebores and hydrangeas

Today I'm sharing some more from our visit to the Blickling Estate last Saturday, we went looking for snowdrops and found them, but also discovered plenty of hellebores and my long-term favourite, hydrangeas, which were definitely full of faded beauty. I mean, just look, and you'll see what I mean. The hydrangeas were faded and almost resembled paper than the colourful petals I first think of, and they're hauntingly beautiful, don't you think?

The greenness and lushness of the ferns is set off but the brown, decaying stems around it - and well, you know I'm a fan of ferns, so I'm sure you'll excuse me just another shot.

The pictures above were taken as we wound and wended our way through the garden to the Orangery at the edge of the garden. One day I'll get there and actually go into the Orangery, but once again I've had to make do with peering through the windows. I shared a similar shot - or maybe even the same one, who knows? - in the snowdrop post and I'm still impressed with how well it came out through the glass, and one full of condensation at that. 

I bet it was much warmer in there than I was outside peering in!

The real discovery though was behind the Orangery. As well as the snowdrops, there were plenty of hellebores and they were their usual embarrassed gorgeousness, and unusually there were plenty of yellow ones. I think most often they're pink, the ones in my garden definitely are. In the walled kitchen garden I'd also spotted some dark, almost black hellebores, but clearly I was so enamoured by them I didn't actually photograph them. 

And despite thinking I had plenty of photos of the ones from behind the Orangery, I didn't, but thankfully the shot I do have is pretty special. Behind the Orangery there was also a bit of a white bench theme going on, and I imagine this one will be a glorious place to rest awhile in warmer weather.

The garden it looks out onto was full of early colour, the mahonias with their pink buds and yellow flowers also looked great and I took the opportunity to get up close. And in doing so, spotted another white bench. I told you it was a theme.

Another burst of colour in this part of the garden was coming from the dogwoods and their vibrant red stems. The grey-green of the euphorbia-like plants (I'm pretty sure they're a form of euphorbias) provided the perfect foil to the flaming red, and looked great growing through the dogwoods. Perhaps that's something I could replicate with my own dogwoods, it's definitely something to consider isn't it?

And as if to prove that the euphorbia-like plant was beautiful in its own right - and I think they are, it's MOH who likens our euphorbias to daleks - this one was straining over the path to be noticed.

With the rain, yes rain, sadly not dew, it really did have a point and one it made well, don't you think?

Happy Valentines - and beyond - from HomeSense

When HomeSense got in touch recently and shared details of their faux flowers, I knew that I could hold out no longer. I've seen an increase of Spring blooms in the shops, including some in a snowy Munich and as they say, resistance was futile. So after work on Monday, I headed off to the Homesense in Tunbridge Wells on a mission.

I didn't realise though quite how much of a challenge I'd set myself. I mean, just look at what I was confronted with.

Price-wise the stems ranged from £2.99 to £7.99 and while there was obviously no scent, that was the only difference to real blooms I could see. That and the fact that I'd unlikely to find such a wide array of blooms in a flower shop at this time of year. I was very tempted by the hydrangeas, their colour was good and realistic but they weren't quite what I was looking for.

And then I saw the pink peonies. Immediately I was transported back to our wedding day in 2017, where my surprise bouquet was, yes you've guessed it, pink peonies. I say surprise bouquet as I'd left the choice of my bouquet to our wedding planners (I guess that's a story for another day). They knew I wanted a modern style, I didn't want roses and that my dress wasn't conventional (it was bronze) and I trusted them to come up trumps, which they did. I hadn't realised until then, how much I liked peonies. 

So once I spotted the peonies it was more about how many and what colour, and what else would go alongside them to make the bouquet less wedding-y and less pink. It's not that I don't like pink, I do, but having a solely pink bouquet in the house full time could, I think, get a little wearing and a bit twee. 

But I'd made my choices and I quickly went to pay before I added another armful of these stems to the bouquet, they really are that good.

Back home I piled the armful of flowers onto the table and realised again how realistic they looked. And how unlikely it would be for me to have a bunch of fresh flowers quite this large. And on Valentine's day too. Not that MOH wouldn't buy me flowers, but I disagree with how the prices are inflated at this time of year, so I always say to him another time of year will be fine. It's a bit like going out for a meal around this time of year, set menus come out and that annoys me too.

But back to the flowers and celebrating Valentines. I decided to arrange them in a handheld bouquet, which gives the modern style I like, but also is quite hard to do - or at least I find it hard to do - as I find I need at least three pairs of hands to do it well and tie the ribbon around the stems without them rearranging themselves. 

But I'm pleased with the result.

It's such a large bouquet that as you can see I struggled to get the bouquet and myself into the same shot.

You might have already realised I'm impressed with these blooms, and while they're slightly unseasonal - peonies are usually out in June - it's nice to see such blooms right now. And to know they'll last too, so I'll be enjoying them for many months to come.

What do you think, will you be tempted by faux flowers this year?

*This is a collaborative post with HomeSense, however all views and opinions are my own.