Bonjour mes amis from the sunny & snowy French Alps – I have found a connection. Sadly my favourite boulangerie no longer offers wi fi, so I have had to opt for a bar – noisier but warm & cosy. Thank you for joining me here for a look back June!

June is probably my favourite  but busiest garden month and was exceptionally busy generally in 2013. After a slow start to the year June saw the beginning of the long hot summer.

Outside of the garden June was a hectic month. I took three days away from home to visit The Sussex Flower School to take a one to one course with Georgia Miles. I had a day course at The Grower with Belinds Grey inspiring us to grow and cook lovely summer vegetables and I was very lucky to be invited to Ascot for a fabulous day out. I also visited the Ely Cathedral Flower Festival and arranged the flowers for a friends party – my first full blown garden party.

It was all great fun, but meant I was starting to feel pressured with my normal jobs of family, home and garden.  June is a particularly busy month in the garden as the long evenings always tempt me outside for ‘just another hour’ after dinner to keep on top of the mounting jobs. Adding regular blogging and my Open University course was a lot to fit in.

Among the many highlights of the month:

Cauldron of SticksA cauldron of stocks for my friends party.

Party FlowersArches of roses and fairy lights for the garden party. I found it hard to arrange the flowers and take good photographs, so the pictures for this post were a bit disappointing.

Lupin MasterpieceLupin Masterpiece in a June herbaceous border.

Flowers in a BirdcageFlowers in a birdcage from my course at the Sussex Flower School.

Ascot HatsLovely hats at Ascot.

Belinda CourseA truly inspirational day at The Grower. This was actually posted in early July as I was so behind with my blog events.

June was a month with a lot of fun and not enough gardening and blogging. I went into July and the school holidays feeling very behind on sowing, planting out and weeding and blog posts.

Here are a few more pictures from the archives:

June Collage

I have realised as I look back at these photos that I never wrote a post about the stunning Ely Cathedral Flower Festival. I have lots of pictures so might come back to this in January.

As today is New Year’s Eve I wish you a very happy 2014! We will be celebrating French style tonight so to all Bonne Annee et bonne sante.

I hope to see you tomorrow for a look back at July.