Wild Frontier

I'm entering Killearn Cottagers Horticultural Show tomorrow- I'll be taking as many dahlia stems as are good enough to go, some small fuschia flower heads laid out on small boards, and I've done a seasonal arrangement with rose hips, brambles and deep red roses. It turns out my bathroom is a great flower arranging studio! 😀 The basic idea had been in my head for several and I was enjoying mulling it over and really looking forward to working on it this evening.  I'd gone out for an hour 'floraging' then started putting it together.  I had to go out to get supermarket roses to complete it, and there had been a rush on the cut flowers- nearly a national disaster!  - but I got perfect deep red ones.  I'm very pleased with how its turned out.

Both my mum and my grandma inspired my love of flowers and gardening.  My grandma (my mum's mum) had a lovely garden where candytuft would self seed in the gravel driveway, and a pink rambling rose climbing over a trellis frame made from branches in the back garden.  The flowers I remember in the first house I lived in was a hypericum by the front door - these yellow open flowers were so friendly, and pink phlox, I was interested by the feel of it's spiky leaves and the shape and colour of the petals.     We moved to a different house when I was 6, and my grandpa (dad's dad) planted potatoes in a wee patch at the side of the house.  A few years later that area became my garden and I remember planting pansies and primulas mainly, and I recall the whole garden had lots of ferns which I quite liked.  There were also 2 red rhododendrons at the top of the back garden, and 2 gorgeous pink ones with really big flowers in the front.  The previous owners had ap...

I had my first look at potential sites for Wild Frontier this week - one was planned while the other was very unexpected! First was a golf course less than 10 minutes drive from home.  I'd emailed several local golf courses and the local council estates dept during the previous week, and got an immediate keen response from Hilton Park saying there are several potential areas on the land owned by the golf course.  So I arranged a time to go and look, and the greenkeeper took me out for a recce on a golf buggy to see the most suitable spots. I saw two areas which look like they might work well - one for the early stage of WF and the other for the long term.      I found out about the second place by chance.  I'd been picking up a hay bale for the rabbis near Blair Drummond, and drove home past Oakwood Garden Centre near Killearn.  There are some big polytunnels on their site, and I was wondering if there was land there that I could get to use.  As s...

For the last few weeks I've been developing the structure of the business plan, getting AI images and working on the business plan with ChatGPT.  I'd never used AI  for anything except Google searches before and was really pleased I started working with it.  The first thing I used it for was logo image generation, and as I got more ideas for these images and then their refinement I was impressed with how the images progressed.   It went from a nice simple logo image to a series of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter as well as woodland and countryside scenes and then a great image of an overhead view of an ideal flower farm, all within the beautiful round emblem format, with the same font and thistle positioning.                       As well as the images I gave Chat prompts for the business plan, and it became a really interesting process - after a short time of me outlining my ideas Chat was ...

I drove past a field on the way back from Strathblane one evening in the middle of July which had big round haybales all over the field, and the sun was starting to set behind them and it looked lovely, so I planned to go back there the following evening to get a few photos.  But the hay bales had all been taken up off the field so that was that plan out the window.  There were some thistles silhouetted, as well as some grasses on the roadside so I thought I'd make do with taking a couple of pics of them, but then a tractor with a trailer loaded with round hay bales (haw haw)  drove past creating a wee breeze that gave lovely movement to the grass. So here is Wild Frontier's first Letter From The Landscape.