Some things from the garden in May

Going back through the stuff salvaged from the old computer.  Can't seem to find the photos from Winchester cathedral, must be somewhere.

But this is a Winchester cathedral rose anyway.

Blue geranium and red wallflower, the latter now over, the geraniums still going, as they do.  I like them very much and so do the pollinating insects.

Those big loud yellow flowers again, whose name I still haven't established.  They behave oddly like dandelions in their habits of flowering and seeding.  French lavender in the background, whose flowerheads have since died off, but a second lot seemed to be waiting, so I've snipped all the old ones off to give them some encouragement.  We've not grown the French lavender before.  I can't quite get sorted out between French lavender, spike lavender, lavandin, or whatever.  I've always thought of this one with the tall flowers with the long bunny-rabbit ears of a more reddish purple and the rather turpentiny scent as French lavender anyway.  Googling didn't make anything clearer, but if you want a feast for the eyes, just enter 'lavender' into a Google image search.  There, I've done it for you.  Which led me incidentally to discover that you can now drop an image of your own into the search box, and it will find you 'visually similar images'.  I did it with the above pic and got lots of pictures of stage acts with wacky lighting.  Very strange.

Oriental poppies, growing under some dogwood bushes which threaten to swamp them, but which make for some interesting light and shade effects and whose variegated leaves do set the red off nicely.  There were pink ones too, but I made a collage with those which I'll put up another time.

These are also now over, the annual self-seeded, double-petaled, opium-type (how's that for a row of compound adjectives?) cultivars are just beginning now.

Allium.  Not quite sure that I took this in our garden, as I can't think how I'd have managed to get the white background, but if not then where they were escapes me, we had them here too.

 And a red red rose.  When I was a kid there was a box of greetings cards in the sideboard drawer called 'The Rose Bowl', with photos, self-evidently, of bunches of brightly lit, blowsy, typical roses, in china vases or silver rose bowls.  For some reason  I hated these cards, they seemed insipid and pointless, I liked naturalistic pictures of horses and elephants and lions and such like, later perhaps I cared for landscapes.  I liked real flesh-and-blood roses, loved their scents and colours, and one year when I was about ten made a cordial from the petals of the Elizabeth rose by the drive, I don't know where I got that idea from, had no recipe, I think I just thought the perfume was so delectable one ought to be able to eat or drink it, which is a principle I've been working on ever since.  But pictures of flowers, especially photos, left me cold or worse. Now I do enjoy photos of flowers, taking and looking at them, and try to do it in such a way that might offer some drama or surprise.  But a small part of me thinks it's a bit of a cop out, somewhat bland and simpering, that I shouldn't just be fobbing my camera and blog off with gifts of flowers.

Still, I expect I'll get over myself.