About Me

I'm Ruth, a gardener, cat lover, daydreamer and bookworm living in Christchurch, New Zealand. I'm never happier than when I'm at home surrounded by my pretty things or pottering in my garden. I enjoy photographing the little things around me and documenting the progress of my garden over the season. I mostly use a Canon PowerShot SX10 IS (not a DSLR, sadly) and recently I've been using my phone camera and the Pixlr-O-Matic editing programme to create some dreamy, vintage-look pictures.

Camellia Rose represents two beautiful flowers and two opposite seasons. While I am wholeheartedly a summer girl I believe in living seasonally and making the most of the changes each brings.

In my back yard I have designed and built a brick-paved potager garden, which produces food for most of the year. In summer I grow tomatoes, chillis and peppers, runner beans, canneloni and borlotti beans for drying, potatoes, lettuce, spring onions, carrots, herbs, sweet corn, snow peas and regular peas, and a selection of berries. I have four apple trees (two are ballerinas in pots), a feijoa tree, two dwarf almonds and a dwarf peach tree, as well as a very productive lemon tree that's probably older than I am. I also have a small but productive glasshouse.

In winter I grow salad crops like rocket, sorrel and Freckles lettuce. I overwinter some crops like spring onions, carrots, broccoli and cauliflowers. Garlic and leeks do well outside, and in the glasshouse I have some pots of salad greens and peas. I also keep my strawberries in hanging baskets in the glasshouse for early berries in spring!

I'm now working on creating dreamy English-style borders for my garden full of beautiful flowers for picking. I love flower arranging and some of the favourites that I grow are roses, peonies, sweet peas, starball scabiosa, hydrangeas, carnations, camellias, ranunculus, freesias and hellebores. I do a regular feature post called "Flowers Monthly" on the 15th of each month where I show what has been blooming  in my garden that month.

This is Lui. He likes to keep an eye on things here on the blog.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you come back soon!