In an English country garden

Today, I took stock of some of the plants in our garden, using a wonderful new app. This is the list, some of which appear in the collage above.

Brown leaf geranium, Italian buckthorn, common lilac, green alkanet, Japanese spirea, coral bells, Japanese barberry, leopard’s bane, Ninebark, Chinese Hawthorne, flowering currant, and Japanese camellia. 

There is nothing so lovely as a sweet sounding plant name. George Orwell wrote an article about it once, arguing against using the pompous sounding Latin names in favour of the poetry of traditional plant lore. Give me leopard’s bane over doronicum pardalianches any day …