A garden of ideas...

I can bearly believe that nearly a month has gone by since my last post on here, there just never seem enough spare moments in my week for blogging at this time of year.... all the more opportunity to think up ideas for future posts when the weather keeps me inside!

At least during 2008, I've managed to tick a few more gardens off my list of "want to visit" in this area and so decided that I couldn't pass the opportunity by to mention this one...

The Jardins de Broceliande is a wonderful garden to the west of Rennes. It's almost what I'd call an experimental garden where so many different ideas have been tried out and there for you to discover. Some of them in my view really work, whilst others probably need some tweaking! All in all though if you're looking for some interesting ideas or you're new to gardening it's a garden I'd really recommend. As an aside, if you've got young children, there's plenty there for them too to discover aside of the various animals on site and playpark!

This was an interesting amateur garden of a "dining room"!

And an original idea for a water feature!

They had also got some novel ideas for labelling of plants too ....


Not to forget plenty of places to sit and admire the scenery...

The tour of the site starts with the potager with a good collection of vegetables being grown, followed by a rose garden - full of many different varieties. There are a collection of amateur gardens too which are in the process of development.

For those of you intersted in growing your own fruit trees - there are a number of different forms of tree here - especially good for people who maybe haven't got enough space for a proper orchard but are still keen to grow tree fruit.

They have a great collection of Dahlias too for those of you like myself who are fans of these beautiful plants - they make great cut flowers!

Also in amongst all their ideas were some interesting pathways...

I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

More butterflies.....

You can never have enough Butterflies gracing your garden with their presence - I don't think I'd really ever appreciated all the many insects that go towards making a garden a more interesting place to be - aside of all the beautiful plants of course!! Some of these insects are what actually enable some of the plants to exist in the first place by protecting them against pests that will strip them of their leaves or even worse eat them down to nothing!

I recently read a posting by someone on one of the expat websites in France stressing the shortage of butterflies over here this year... not the case in our own garden - you only need to walk passed the Marjoram and a whole host of them fly off - this is one of their favorite spots - along with the Echinops (round blue thistle type flowers), and the Limonium (Sea Lavender).

A Meadow Brown enjoying the Thistles

Quite how many butterflies can you get on one flower!?

Gatekeepers on the Marjoram.

Another Gatekeeper on the brambles.

A Comma butterfly enjoying the Common Sea Lavender.

Even the Bumblebees enjoy the Echinops!

Then I discovered what looked like tiny moths on the Tansy - again would be very interested if anyone knows what these are.

And finally what I think is a Poplar Admiral - again would love confirmation on this one too.