Pink etc
I told you I’d show you my floral extravaganza again after I messed with it a little.*
Pink.
And just in case you think I’ve put all the pink in front to make an impressive photo, this is what it looks like from the other side. 
Meanwhile . . . it’s snowing. It’s not snowing like it’s snowing in Virginia, for which I am deeply thankful, but it’s still snowing. I’ve decided I want a conservatory. Once I finish recovering** from putting the weight-bearing floor in Third House’s attic I’m going to knock down the sitting-room wall into the garden and start putting up quadruple-glazed glass walls and solar baseboard heaters. I might put French doors in the main bedroom and have a sort of full-length bay window on that side too. And then I can fill it/them with tea and china roses and sasanqua camellias and orchids and greenhouse carnations and hippeastrums and freesias and maddenii rhododendrons . . . and chocolate cosmos and begonias and osteospermums and geraniums year round, and I don’t know what all else because I don’t have a conservatory and therefore try to avoid knowing too much about what I can’t grow.
And have I told you about the sedum roof? Yes. I also want to slap a green roof on Third House, which, unlike the cottage, has a nice gentle slope so the poor sedums won’t have to hold on with their fingernails. I’m not looking forward to getting planning permission*** for this but maybe by the time I get to that point† planted-up roofs will be commonplace and the government will be giving us eco-promoting grants to do it. A girl can dream.
Meanwhile I need to be grinding on with PEG II so I can finish recovering from putting the backlist-bearing floor in and begin saving up for the conservatory. And then Marechal Niel†† and I will sit with our feet up in the warm at Third House and admire the snow drifts.†††
* * *
* The kitchen magnet, which on my screen at least you can’t quite read unless you already know what it says, declares: They lied. Hard work has killed lots of people. It could have been a lot worse, given my collection of kitchen magnets.^ I tend not to remember to check for stuff like what’s behind something when I take pictures indoors, and this can be a dreadful mistake.^^
^ One tiny benefit to losing the old house and living in a cottage so small that everyone but the occasional urban flat-dweller suffers extreme claustrophobia upon stepping over the threshold+ is that I have felt free to get out my old collection of crass and insolent kitchen magnets and indeed to augment it. In the old house I used to worry about the grandchildren. Who are mostly by now too old to be disturbed by kitchen magnets, but they’re still all so polite.
+ Books not only furnish a room, they crowd you right out of it. Sometimes several rooms. Sometimes all the rooms in the house.= I was very amused when Diane in MN posted in the forum about lining hallways with bookshelves, and how well this works . . . till you run out of hallways. Yes.
= Okay, the bathroom only has books on the windowsill. Well, almost only.
^^ Some of the biggest cobwebs in England live in my cottage. This is a combination of deplorable housekeeping and a slight soft spot for spiders. I don’t want them on me, you understand, but a nice small tactful English spider that stays quietly in its corner will probably be left alone to get on with it. However any spider showing artistic initiative such as manifestations of ‘radiant’, ‘terrific’, or ‘some hellhound’ in web-weaving is totally welcome forever, and if it would like teeny weeny beakers of champagne or slivers of chocolate these will be provided.
** You’re all buying multiple copies of PEGASUS, yes?
*** Both Third House and the cottage are in a Conservation Area which means you need planning permission to prune your rosebushes—careful, you and your secateurs are altering the amenity level of the neighbourhood—and gods help you if you want to change the colour of your house. Which in fact I do. But not this year. I can’t face the paperwork. And Third House has this whacking monster Leylandii which is so frelling tall the army helicopters trip on it when they buzz overhead and I looooong to have the ugly thing down—and my neighbours are longing right along with me—but the Tree Removal Form is forty thousand pages long and looking at it makes me lose the will to live.
† After everyone has bought multiple copies of PEG II.
†† http://www.classicroses.co.uk/roses/m/marechal_niel.html We had one at the old house and while she was in a relatively sheltered position I don’t think her essential hardiness was the problem so much as her habit of trying to produce her first flush of big fat buds early enough to catch the last frelling late frost of a bad year. And unlike, say, Agnes, who is another early one, if she gets frosted, she sulks. Agnes heaves a deep sigh and starts growing a fresh lot of buds. But then Agnes is a rugosa and rugosas are tough. You have to be firm with your rugosas. Undisciplined rugosas eat unwary small children and absent-minded gardeners and are probably John Wyndham’s original source for triffids. I love rugosas. Just by the way. I have Agnes at the cottage. She’s doing really well. It’s a good thing I don’t get many visitors. With her and Souvenir and the three Mmes and a few others I have perhaps not introduced you to yet, it’s dangerous out there.
††† There are of course other problems with indoor gardening. One of the reasons the floors don’t get hoovered very often at the cottage^ is because I’m busy moving all the plants off the windowsills to clean the encrusted plant sludge off the window glass and the painted surfaces. Did you know that dark red geranium petals will stain your white woodwork? Gaah. And I want an entire conservatory? Well. Yes. I am insane. This is not news.
And you know those pretty little hyacinth vases? You put your bulb in the top and just add water? How about the fact that once the flower spike grows your hyacinth will plunge top-heavily over the side?
Creative use of large pile of magazines.
Creative use of Kleenex box. This bulb was a freller to begin with since it insisted on growing leaves at both ends.
^ aside from melting vacuum cleaners
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