Summer Flowers

In my annual fit of gardening enthusiasm - which, I confess, sometimes only lasts as long as it takes to make a trip to the garden centre and peters out before actually planting the luckless plants - I bought some petunias and impatiens at the beginning of the month. Spurred on by an enthusiastic Cherub and the idea that it would look nice to have something flowering in the garden for Cherub's birthday party we managed to put them into pots and tubs. There was a slight hiccup as I randomly grabbed a bag of multipurpose compost rather than proper potting compost - but hey! Compost is compost, yes? Or at least, the wrong compost is surely better than being abandoned to die slowly (or quickly) in a tray. I hope.

Some of the petunias are a beautiful deep pink - deeper than it looks in this picture - and seem to be surviving my inadequacies (three warm, sunny and waterless summer days, despite several mental notes along the lines of "must water flowers"):

In the interests of full disclosure, the purple petunias are drooping sadly:

And these poor sunflowers, grown from seeds Cherub planted at playgroup, are barely hanging in:

Fortunately the impatiens get a little more shade, and are not doing so badly:

I'm sure you will be glad to hear I watered them before writing this post, although writing first and forgetting to water them later would be more typical of my approach to gardening.