Throwback Friday #141 ‘Albert Street Garden’ 2022

Taken at the height of summer in our garden in 2022, a blast of colour for these first few days of boring old February. What have we got here? Salvias, rudbeckias and heleniums mostly. Boom!

Throwback Friday #139 ‘Bamboo’ 2014

Taken in the summer of 2014, a vigorous clump of bamboo at the back of the old French house.

Throwback Friday #138 ‘Centaurea’

More old-school 35mm flower photographs from the early 2000s or thereabouts, celebrating the gorgeous blues, pinks and purples of centaureas, and here, served two ways: the first being an image of the field cornflower, Centaurea cyanus, and the second, Centaurea montana, or perennial cornflower. Both press my buttons and produce an impatience in my January bones for a lovely blast of heat.

Throwback Friday #133 ‘Rhus typhina’

These photographs of the glorious foliage of a Staghorn sumac tree were taken in the garden belonging to my late grandmother at some point in the mid-2000s – can’t remember when exactly, though I remember actually taking the pictures themselves; walking down the flight of enclosed concrete steps that led down from Grandma’s first floor flat and out into the garden at the back, where this tree opened out from a small central bed like a festive umbrella.

Throwback Friday #128 ‘Physalis’

Really not sure from when or where these photographs date, but likely from mid-2000 or thereabouts. Who doesn’t love physalis, with those perfect paper lanterns and pop of orange. I was obviously drawn to taking these images on a day when the sun was lighting them very pleasingly.

Throwback Friday #126 Houseplants (2021)

This photograph was taken just minutes before we opened our garden to the public as part of last year’s National Garden Scheme shindig; the view here is of our little patch of seating space outside the kitchen, not usually as packed out with plants as this, but not far off.

Throwback Friday #123 ‘Umbellifers Anonymous’

A random bunch of umbellifers – dates and locations long-since forgotten – but likely dating from the early noughties, and all photographed on 35mm slide film originally.

Throwback Friday #106 Cherry Blossom 2013

A blast of improbable pink against an improbably blue Spring sky from back in 2013.

Throwback Friday #105 Spring (2014)

Some impressionist photographic play seeking to capture the Spring froth of our garden back in 2014, when the border was floating with fox gloves, alliums, thalictrums and tellima spires.

Throwback Friday #104 Eremurus (2003/4)

I can’t tell you exactly when this photograph was taken – a close-up of one of the hundreds of flowers comprising the impressive orange tower of a fox-tail lily – but I can tell you where it was taken: a flower border in the front garden of a rural post office in Lincolnshire. It was taken on an old 35mm camera, and the negative scanned digitally a few years later.