Hey friends!

We’ve been blessed with a few extra days of summer and I’ve been holding onto them as much as possible.

I was sitting outside a couple of days ago, listening to the bees buzzing when I suddenly noticed how many of my plants are purple! So I thought why not enjoy the last few rays of perfect sunshine and decided to go on a garden flower safari and I wanted to take you guys along with me so you can enjoy the relaxing atmosphere and pretty plants and a few bugs too! 

Starting off my flowershoot are these tiny purple daisies, I think they’re called Michaelmas daisies (a type of aster) and are a tough perennial that I don’t remember actually planting, but they’re so pretty poking out from underneath/behind other flowers that I’m not going to disturb them.

My oxeye daisies are beginning to fade, but they’ve flowered three times this year and even now are still popular with the bugs – this Speckled wood butterfly was definitely enjoying them. I’m very proud of my daisies as I grew them from seed last year and managed not to kill them over winter! 

Two little pink chive flowers are next, before I got into gardening I used to think that 1 chive seed = 1 pot of chives! Safe to say I just liberally scattered whole packets of them this year!

One of my favourite yellow flowers are Black eye Susans (Rudbeckia) this one was complete with a Silver Y moth which is one of the UK’s most common immigrant moths. My Suzie’s are enormous this year and I’m trying to dry some of them to keep indoors as a sunny pick-me-up.

These Hyssops are loved by the bees!

Last year I actually managed to accidentally kill my Verbena bonarensis off during winter, which was a shame because they were huge. This years ones aren’t quite as big, but still loved by the butterflies, this is one of my favourite Small tortoiseshell butterfly photos of the year.

Actually Small torts have had a particularly bad year due to the rain (but most butterflies have) and this one spent an age flittering among all the flowers.

Although Large whites did pretty well on my purpose grown cabbages.

One of my growing firsts this year has been my Comfrey plant, its got such amazing bell like flowers and I love the colour of the purple against the lushness of the green!

I really hope you enjoyed these flowery photos and that they bought a little brightness to your week because they filled me with such joy. 

As always thank you so much for reading my friends, and have a lovely week!