The first ripe blackberry - on 2nd August - Robin would have picked it straight away.
The brambles line both sides of the footpath - most of them are still green like this ...
and some are still fringed with the petals of their flowers.
On my way back from my walk I stop in the village to post birthday cards and to buy big bunches of white dahlias, purple and pink daisy asters and punnets of raspberries from the allotment man. I eat a whole punnet for my breakfast while I put away last night's supper dishes, arrange the flowers in jugs and do some whites hand washing.
It's deliciously hot and I want to be in the garden but instead I drive to the dentist in a small town 25 minutes away. It's an emergency appointment although what I thought was serious - I had bad toothache yesterday - I feared an abscess or a cracked tooth - turned out to be neither - just a painful gum. Great relief.
Later after my gardener leaves, and while it's still warm, I put a tray of tomatoes and garlic into the oven to roast and start pulling up weeds in the concrete slabs surrounding the swimming pool. I find weeding quite addictive....it keeps me from dwelling on my worries....and sometimes it's 8 o'clock before I realise it.
Luckily I smell the tomatoes before they start to burn.
Photo Blog Number Three - late June.
I plant up the bed which runs along the front of the house, with annuals - just to bring some colour to the entrance...and it makes me feel as if I'm doing something instead of just maintaining the garden as it is now until the work on it starts next year.
Before and
after.
The roses in the garden were lovely...they are mostly over now...
red ones cut from my sister's garden for the kitchen windowsill....
and peachy pink ones - my favourites - for the kitchen table...
I take petals to Robin's grave..
and ones in full bloom.
This female pheasant only brought her baby one time into the garden..
so adorable...
and I think this is an adolescent male - with its colour just beginning to show.
Sometimes if I have time I walk further up the lane to find even more wonderful views...
their field was rolled up in late June...
and my first and only sighting of a field fare.
Lovely summer lunch at the home of a dear friend....
blueberries in her garden...
and one of Robin's ceramics hiding under the alchemilla mollis ...I love finding memories of him and all his quirkiness in the gardens of our friends and family.
A cute baby robin with his red breast just beginning to show...
they are always around me ...in the garden...and this one on a fence in the Co-op car park...
reminding me that my Robin is still with me....never far away in my thoughts....but so unreachable in my life as it is now....imagining him...remembering him.... just isn't the same as feeling his hand in mine... seeing his face turned to me on the pillow. Sometimes it's hard to bear.
