Gardeners take a lot of pride in their gardens. Especially in those plants we’ve grown from seed or a cutting. It’s a parental pride, a feeling of having been there at the moment when the thing before you was an almost-nothing, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it seed. It’s a pride also borne out of constant fussing and nurturing of our seedling as they matured from vulnerable almost-somethings to very needy small plants almost indistinguishable from the weeds around them, to finally the pleasures of foliage, buds and Bloomsday (not to be confused, though sometimes coinciding with that other Bloomsday on the 16th of June).
At the moment I have tiny salmon-pink Linum (flax) flowers growing across two beds, and picked daily for jam-jar floral arrangements. I must confess myself to be silly with satisfaction and swellheadedness about them. If I were on Instagram, or using Twitter, it’d be Linum-this, Linum-that, with links to photographs of the flowers from every imaginable angle all the day long. Even though, both in horticultural stature and cultivation skills, Linum are not particularly difficult to grow.