Midsummer colours

Today has been hot and sunny and everything was full of colour. I stopped to admire this glorious climbing rose ‘Shropshire Lad’, which has established well along my hedge at the back of the garden. It smells of Turkish Delight and has beautiful flowers:

The first nasturtium flowers of the season went in a salad, along with my red tinged lettuce

At the allotment today, I planted out the last of my rainbow chard seedlings and spotted their glorious pink roots:

It was almost too difficult to plant these in the soil they were so lovely. It was a good day at the allotment, with this amazing harvest of gooseberries, strawberries and a handful of self-seeded purple radishes

So it’s been a kind of technicolour day but on midsummer’s night I wandered into the garden as the light left the sky around 11pm

I was struck by the sparkle of white flowers as darkness fell. The clover at the back of the garden

A white foxglove along the fence

The bog cotton and yellow water buttercup in the pond

There’s something special about these white flowers that you can still see when everything else is nearly dark. The year’s turning again as we pass the long light nights of midsummer but there’s compensation in the beginning of the harvest.