A very busy cutting garden

Now that the wedding season is in full swing again, and all those people who have been waiting and postponing and changing their plans can finally tie the knot, we have been very busy indeed with picking all the flowers. Despite having been lucky enough to find some lovely new pickers to help in the garden this year, Barney and I have still found ourselves working pretty much all the daylight hours; he arrives at five or six in the morning and picks flowers until the middle of the day, with me joining in after the school run, and then I come back after supper in the evening and pick until dusk. It has been lovely, but somewhat draining. We pick more than a hundred buckets of flowers each week now, but still the garden is a mass of bloom and loveliness. Picking at this time of year is really like a pre-emptive way of dead-heading, so that, if you can turn a blind eye to the festoons of bindweed clinging to everything, it all still looks so fresh and pretty.