My favourite garden and awarded the Best Show Garden, the Eco Oasis Garden

* I was invited to the press preview of Gardeners’ World Live and provided with a pair of tickets to visit the show, therefore all my posts will be marked as 'Ad’ though as usual my views and opinions are very much my own.

As we wandered amongst the gardens I had an early clear favourite, and it was this garden designed by Dan Hartley. The corten steel drew me in, and the lush planting kept my eyes busy while looking at the planting at multiple heights and the small details like the insect hotel (bottom left in the first photo below), and the tin watering can (to the left of the seats in the second photo) and the bottle of rose temptingly placed on the table in the seating area!

But it was more than that, it was the feeling of calm as I admired the garden and it’s hard to explain. It wasn’t as intense a feeling as when we first descended into Hunte’s gardens in Barbados but it was along the same lines - and for any garden to give you ‘all the feels’ well, it has to be good doesn’t it?

This garden was inspired by the Gardener’s World Live theme of ‘The Good Life’ and aims to combine eco-friendly elements, aesthetic appeal and mindful living. The show notes say that ‘organic abundance is represented by vibrant, lush planting’ and that the garden invites people to experience the beauty of a balanced and environmentally conscious outdoor space. The garden is designed to be maintained with organic gardening principles and integrates simple water conservation and aims to enhance the natural ecosystem, which all in turn allows people to create their own ‘good life’.

And so I was pleased to see my favourite garden at the show awarded the Best Show Garden - of course, I had no say in it whatsoever, but it clearly appealed to many more people than just me.

Now wouldn’t it be nice to crack open that bottle of rose? Well, once it’s been on ice anyway!

* With thanks to Gardeners’ World for inviting me to Gardeners’ World Live, it was just as good as I expected! I’ll be sharing more from my visit to the show - I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

The third of our black and white pictures

I’ve already shared more about the first and second pictures which now hang framed on our bedroom wall, today the image choice turns away from holiday memories and is a much more day to day image, or it was until we moved.

We’d lived in our London house in Blackheath for just over twenty years before we moved to rural Nottinghamshire, and we were keen to have some of our Greenwich life represented in our four black and white picture choices - it had been a big, infact the biggest, part of our lives together.

We wanted something that represented the area, rather than our old house, but something that wasn’t quite the usual shot of Greenwich. Greenwich Park was an obvious choice as we both enjoyed using that space but choosing a single image was tough, so we needed something else.

We regular walked along the Thames Path, and more often than that MOH spent many weekend mornings cycling that way too - I did too at times, but the uphill route home wasn’t a favourite of mine!

This is a photo that I’ve shared here before, and was taken on one of those longer (and permitted) lockdown walks, which explains why there’s few people around - a time when the world was just as crazy (if not more so) than it is today. In the original post I also shared how that walk had revived memories of when MOH proposed, it wasn’t in this spot, but it was on a jetty further along from here. The weather wasn’t like this on that day, it was February and snow was forecast - which of course wasn’t in his plans, and snow is rarely in my plans at all!

In this photo I think there’s more detail in the coloured version - you can see the white twisted columns of the cable car more clearly, but in the black and white version I think it’s the Thames overall that is most prominent.

It’s a great image to have of our long time home, it evokes so many memories of living there and of the area’s heritage, so it’s another great inclusion in our series of four black and white pictures.

Making my mystery block of the month: March

You’ll have seen that I plan to complete Sherri’s mystery block a month quilt and yesterday I shared the test blocks which I made into my fifth charity quilt, today I’m sharing the fabulous and quick to make heart block I made for my own quilt.

For this block I was keen to use the yellow patterned fabric, so that’s what I did. I also realised that I had some fabric from the first block already cut which was the correct width, so that made it an easy choice for the background. I was pleased that this block looked to be relatively straightforward as somehow time was short this month, I’m not sure why.

I do love some chain sewing, it really speeds things up - and with its relatively simple construction it worked well for this block.

I even managed to trim all of the heart blocks I made - this one and the four test blocks - correctly, managing to not cut off the wrong piece of material, so that’s a bonus.

Pondering while adding the borders

I’m really pleased with how this simple but effective block has turned out. The more eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that the fabrics for the green borders are different this month, and that involved a lot of pondering. But during that pondering I’ve also found a new way to store the completed blocks - with a skirt hanger, which is just as well as my niece has now collected my old sewing machine and I can no longer drape the blocks over that!

I’m pretty sure that I won’t have enough of the green fabrics from the first two blocks to complete the whole quilt, and my plan all along was to use complementing fabrics for the green borders. But I didn’t want to use those just when I’d run out, as I wanted to incorporate the changing patterns into my design, and I realised this was the month to start that.

But I still needed to convince myself, and so a hastily mocked up version of the final layout confirmed that it needed to be this month whichever layout I opt for in the end. Additionally Sherri released more information about the sashing, which are borders in between the blocks, this month and where I previously thought I might need four blocks across, now I think I probably can manage with three - next month’s the crunch month for that decision though.

THIS MOCKUP OF THE BORDERS REALLY HELPED

And so, here’s a peek at how the first three blocks look together - I think the quilt is going to be a gem, but then again I am slightly biased!

Join me next month to see how I get on with the next mystery block, and check out my previous posts for my mystery block quilt or the charity quilts made from the test blocks.