FromeBlooms with this bright pink blossom, which is all over the place in Frome at the moment. It’s often by allotments or community gardens, and blooms beautifully against the blue sky. My FromeBlooms.com website is also blooming, with a nice big increase in visitors since this spring’s refresh.

I’m trying a new gardening app called Candide, which can identify and ‘tag’ a plant from a picture. It identified the pink blossom as Ribes, or pink flowering currant. Can any of my eagle eyed regular readers confirm if that seems correct?

Today I’m juggling job interviews, and taking a trip to Taunton to talk on the radio about my garden blog. I also popped into Frome Town Hall to discuss a few ideas about local flowers, which was an exciting meeting with the great benefit of a delicious vegan carrot cake.

I have no clear idea of what will happen next. I need to get a job, and I’d like to do more with community gardening and local flowers… but I’m exploring a few options and meeting some interesting people while I try to figure it out. I’d love to get a Frome Flower Festival plan together for next year, perhaps, and there might be opportunities and funds and people available to get together and make something wonderful happen.

I don’t know exactly what, where or how yet, but I know why I want to do more with local flowers. Because homegrown blooms have ten times less environmental impact than imported flowers.

So perhaps we can celebrate the local, ‘common garden’ flower and enjoy what we have around us instead of importing plastic wrapped, intensively farmed flowers. Because engaging with the local environment and the people around us is so much more satisfying than mindless shopping.

And as usual, I hope that your plans and plants are coming along very nicely.

Jen x