Sicilian Honey Garlic (Nectaroscordum siculum) is an unusual looking plant that is always remarked upon by visitors to the garden during its season of growth (late spring-early summer).
 It's one of the Allium family of bulbs. The stems rise about a metre from the ground topped by what can best be described as a pod. The flowers push out of the pod to form an umbel. The Oxford English Dictionary describes an umbel as "a flower cluster like an umbrella" which pretty much sums it up.
 The bigger bumblebees home in on it and hang off the flowers having a good nosh. Then a final twist: once the flowers are pollinated they morph into seed heads that point straight up.  

 I love the way fronds of ferns unfurl. Ferns look primeval and indeed they are primeval. I once saw a section of ferns in a garden centre promoted with a sign which I thought was a great sales pitch: "Dinosaurs ate these plants." 

 Free plants! A wild garden is a mixture of accident and design. Given the chance plants sometimes appear of their own choosing, costing nothing. At the front of the house the steps down to the basement have been colonised by Campanula poscharskyana. It has lush green leaves all year round and is smothered in violet blue flowers in May/June- yet it is routinely treated as a weed.
 It was probably introduced to the UK with rockeries in mind but it thinks it is scrambling around the mountains of the Balkans where it originates. It spreads rapidly and has escaped from genteel gardens making itself at home in the brick, stone and concrete of London streets. I think it should be considered a bona fide urban wildflower just as the wildflowers of yesteryear flourished in the fields.
 Bumblebees go mad for it and bustle all over C. poscharskyana from dawn till dusk. It grows outside my bedroom window and their busy buzzing is the first thing I hear when I wake up.

 This is Puffball, a sculpture by Norman Dilworth. Readers of this diary who don't know me may get the impression I spend my days pottering in the garden and wandering the countryside. If only that were so but I keep some other irons in the fire to keep body and soul together.
 For quite some time I have worked freelance dealing with the practicalities of installing exhibitions and artworks. Generally this won't figure in the diary because it doesn't have much to do with plants and ecology but once in a blue moon they overlap.
 Case in point the photos above are from a project undertaken on this day two years ago. It's interesting to scroll through the archive and think "Was it really that long ago?" or "I didn't think it was that long ago". Curiously the past often seems both ancient and recent simultaneously.
 So back in 2015 I got a call from Shelley at ADi Solutions who undertake such things and we drove down to a very large house near Bath for a site visit with a view to installing Puffball (then a bundle of rods in an outbuilding). A couple of months later I returned with friend and neighbour Keith; he and I have worked together on numerous projects in the artworld. Also on board a chap called Charles, another one of ADi's merry men.
 It was an interesting piece to install because we needed to take an approach that might appropriately enough be called "organic." The sculpture was first made in the early 1970s and has been exhibited several times since. We had photos but no set of instructions and concluded that it was in effect re-made each time looking the same but different.
 So we too were interpreting the concept of Puffball and re-making it in the spirit of the original. This was a process of trial and error as we re-configured the poles until we evolved a final version that seemed "right".
 As the photos indicate the setting was splendid and the extensive gardens sloped down to the banks of the River Avon which were a haze of wildflowers. 

 Here is a pretty plant with a curious name: Bastard Balm (Melittis melissophyllum). It's one of the Lamiaceae family, sometimes called Dead-nettles i.e. leaves that resemble nettles but no sting.
 It's reputed to be a plant of the hedgerow and woodland edge in the West Country though I've done a lot of walking in those parts and never come across any. I bought several from a garden centre and certainly it's one of those wildflowers that can be considered garden worthy.
 Richard Mabey states in his book Flora Britannica that the name was to distinguish it from Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis). Perhaps this is so but "Bastard" seems a bit harsh?!    

 Dame's-violet, also known as Sweet Rocket (Hesperis matronalis) is one of my favourite plants in the garden. The pink flowered form is nice but the white flowered variety is to my eye even more beautiful. As twilight approaches the flower heads seem almost luminescent.
 Even more exquisite is when there happens to be a seedling where a pollinator has flitted between the pink and the white; the result is a form with white flowers that blush with subtlest hint of pale lilac.

 Bluebells have got issues. There are two kinds of bluebell growing in the garden: tall, upright, unscented ones related to the Spanish Blubell (Hyacinthoides hispanica) and smaller, drooping, fragrant ones which are sometimes called English Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non scripta). I think these are the lovelier of the two.
 The former were here when I moved in, the latter planted by me. Spanish Bluebells have been grown in this country for centuries and became a mainstay of the bulb trade. H. hispanica is easier to establish and thrives in a wide variety of conditions whereas H. non scripta is harder to naturalise. In particular it doesn't like to dry out either in the soil or when lifted so it doesn't store or travel well as an item to be sold by the bulb trade.
 In ancient bluebell woods H. non scripta is the native species. Like many quintessentially English things it's also Welsh, Scottish, Irish and North European. The issue is that where it cross pollinates with the Spanish Bluebell the genetic characteristics of hispanica dominate. The hybrid Hyacinthoides x massartiana  looks more like hispanica and supersedes non scripta as the dominant type. This is not yet the case in ancient woods remote from human habitation but in theory it's inevitable and already a done deal in towns, cities and much of the countryside where bluebells are in effect a "hybrid swarm" of mixed genes.
 The Spanish Bluebell means no harm, it's just doing what comes natural. Indeed in the wild the southernmost range of non scripta and the northernmost range of hispanica must overlap so is hybridisation happening there of its own accord anyway? Hyacinthoides is perhaps then a very variable species by nature.
 Here we enter the science of genetics about which I know very little but it raises some interesting questions. I suppose we humans are a "hybrid swarm"!
 Some ecologists are on a mission to pull up hispanica and the hybrids but they have merit as garden plants in their own right. Trying to eradicate them now is probably a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted though I wouldn't want to plant them next to an ancient bluebell wood.
 I bought bluebells of the drooping, fragrant variety from a specialist grower based in Wales. They're dispatched freshly lifted, arrive still moist then planted straight away. I've tried them in different spots with mixed results; growing them in the grass beneath the shade of the apple tree seems to be to their liking.

  

 As Samuel Beckett once wrote "Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards" so I went to Tower Hamlets Cemetery on Saturday where Roy Vickery was leading a walking tour.
 Roy was formerly Curator of Flowering Plants at the Natural History Museum. As far as I can tell he is one of those people who spends retirement working constantly on various projects. He continues at the Museum as a Scientific Associate curating the lichen collections and he is also President of the South London Botanical Institute.
 I must write an entry about the SLBI sometime. I was quite surprised when I discovered a number of years ago that there is a botanical garden in Tulse Hill. It was founded in 1910 by Allan Octavian Hume, an extraordinary man who among other things was in charge of planting the Great Hedge of India which was over a thousand kilometres long. Anyway that will have to keep for another day.
 Roy leads walks in London from time to time to search for and identify common and uncommon plants growing wild in a particular locale. I remember strolling around Balham a few years ago and the staff of a Chinese restaurant were quite alarmed when they saw us in their back yard looking at a rare plant Roy had spotted growing by the bins.
 Tower Hamlets was one of the seven great cemeteries built in the Victorian era around London and it has a great variety of plants. Some are perhaps survivals from when this area would have been on the edge of the countryside. Some are most likely escapes from local gardens over the years and it looks like some have been introduced more recently in a conscious effort to increase biodiversity. Roy mentioned he had looked round the day before and counted 120 species currently in flower.
 Above are a few of the pics I took: Red Valerian, Cow Parsley, Beaked Hawk's Beard (I think??), Ox-eye Daisy, Greater Celendine, Comfrey, Shining Cranesbill and Greater Stichwort.

 The airy froth of Cow Parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) spreads across the land at this time of year. Along roadsides, on the edge of woodland, in hedgerows, fields and footpaths: it's everywhere.
 It's a bit too rampant for most gardens though you might end up with some anyway. In fact the photo above was taken in my father's garden and it looks fine in the context of letting an area "go wild".    

 This is Geranium phaeum. Botanists and horticulturalists prefer to use to the Latin names of plants as this provides a globally recognized nomenclature.
 Sometimes though the common name has poetry and drama. The maroon flowered G. phaeum is also known as "The Mourning Widow".

 Tellima grandiflora pops up all over the garden. It's a prolific self-seeder and these are very useful plants to have because they obligingly fill any gaps they can find (free of charge!). In a formal garden this damns them to the same category as weeds but in a wild garden they can go native.
 T. grandiflora is a North American plant. It's sold as a garden plant over here and a previous resident probably planted a few which have become many.
 Self-seeders are useful indicator plants i.e. the fact that they flourish says something about their immediate surroundings. In this garden the self-seeders are mostly ones that do well in partial shade and tolerate dry soil. The proliferation comes from the fact that both plant and the seeds find conditions which suit their growth.
 Often the best place to start when making a garden is to look at the plants that are already thriving: it provides a clue to which other plants might (or might not) thrive there.