Mosquito in a Nudist Camp

Once again I've been over to Lynn's to take photos of her garden. I'm fancying some painting this week and short of sitting out there in the elements, this is the next best thing. My camera is older than god and doesn't do much but point and click, but it's enough for me to use for inspiration.

I love the alien landscape of buds and stalks, especially poppies and spring flowers. They've all been fooled into growing early this year by the sunshine we've had in April, so we're way ahead of the usual schedule.

Poppies change so much, from buds to full blooms to seedheads. I've always found them utterly fascinating. The colours are massively varied and I get the squee when I see an unusual one. I used to grow them in Jay's garden and we had blues, burgundies, blacks and reds.

I watched a TV documentary years ago about a chap who would spread poppies all over the countryside. One of his tricks was to put seeds in balls of compost and dung and throw them from a moving train. If you travel to London at certain times of the year you can see little pockets of poppies near various stations and stopping points where he scattered them. That's an amazing legacy to have.

When I was little, maybe 6 or 7, we had a garden at school and I remember taking some packets of sweet pea seeds in for the caretaker to plant. They grew ferociously and I watched them daily throughout the summer. The school has been knocked down now, but I was there a few years ago on the spot where the garden used to be. It's all grass now, but astonishingly there were sweet peas in flower on the ground exactly where mine were planted. Could they be the same ones I wonder? I like to think so.

I don't have much of a garden, sadly. What little I do have is currently looking like Steptoe's yard, desperately in need of a good sort out and de-leafing. It doesn't get a lot of sun, so the clematis is way behind everyone else's in the neighbourhood. I expect there'll be flowers soon though, as we have a multitude of buds. I must remember to go and remove snails, as they managed to eat the whole plants one year. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow and give the place a jetwash while I'm at it. It's increasingly difficult to drag myself away from my work here to do anything outdoors. I could do with my days being a good ten hours longer in order to fit everything in.

We're popping to town this morning to good old B&Q for supplies. I'm looking forward to getting back and cracking on with a few things. I'm once again struggling to fit all the projects in that are going on in my head. Someone posted this on Twitter the other day and it summed me up perfectly:

"I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don't know where to begin. STEPHEN BAYNE"