Poppies with company

In early summer I still have energy to do flower arrangements. Last week's stars were poppies that just started to flower. As I don't colour coordinate in the garden, the poppies got to stay on the same table with magenta pelargonias.

If you have to smoke

Who wants to smoke nowadays? Well, some people still do and you have to find nice ways to hold the cigarette stumps under cover. I bought a couple of old milk jugs for this purpose. The blue one froze last winter and its bottom got all curvy and now it can't stand on its own. Luckily I had a suitable candle holder to make it stay upright and to look even prettier.

Flowers in abundance

If you want to see colourful flowering, visit Mustila at Elimäki (Kouvola) during late May, early June. We visited Mustila last weekend and the azaleas were in flower. The rhododendrons will flower a bit later, maybe on this weekend. If you live in Helsinki, visit Haaga's rhododendron park - I heard that azaleas are at their best there, too.

Mustila is an arboretum so there are also fabulous trees and other plants. The Douglas firs from America are amazing, the highest are about 40 meters!

Scary little people

I don't much like garden gnomes. When we bought Vårkulla we found two old gnomes in the shed. Last weekend my husband put them behind sauna's window. If this doesn't scare unwanted visiters away, what does? Note the hatchet!! The smile seems a bit sinister when you start to think what the gnome might be planning to do...

Looking exotic

I think the lilies look quite exotic even when they are not flowering. This year we have had a LOT of lily bugs - orange little buggers that eat up all your lilies if you don't kill every one of them. Otherwise there is no trouble with lilies, they are easy to grow, easy to move from place to place and they are easy for the eyes, too.

It's all uphill

It's great that the house is on a hill - no trouble with floods or water standing under the house. But when you buy (heavy) furniture and need to get it to the house or decide to make a flower bed on the upper yard you don't love the hill so much.

Under the apple tree

Our apple tree is really old. Someone has known how to cut it...let's hope it survives us as we are no tree doctors! We only cut the tree if the branches touch our forehead when walking under them. I would need somebody to tell me how to cut the tree so it makes as little apples as possible. We only eat a couple and the rest are left to rot behind our shed.