Some of my favourite flowering house plants

I've been doing the final checks on the Preservation Trust website and assembling the last few pictures which are being used to illustrate it. I got back after lunchtime, so quickly assembled some toast and smoked mackerel pate that Woodpeckers made a couple of days ago. As I ate whilst sitting at the dining table by the patio doors into the garden, I read a book about house plants and started thinking about where I would position the plants I bought at the nursery recently.

The weather was still dull, windy with drizzling rain still falling after many hours. I suddenly had the urge to put the plants in their pots on the table when I finished my food and take a picture of them all assembled together before I separated them all around the house, the garden and the patio. I had to back out of the sliding doors to get focus on the nearest plants, which actually signalled the end of the rain.

I did get some shots of the two cosmos plants, a trailing red tuberous begonia, a rather plain red pelargonium, as well as my favourite pelargonium ardens, which has just come into flower again. But pride of place in the front were the four pots of different streptocarpus which are all in flower. I bought them this week because I found a garden centre which had unusual varieties and decided to start keeping them again after several years of not having any at all. I have grown them for many years before that and produced many new plants from cuttings quite successfully, but had given most of them away. Then I neglected the remainder which decided to give up the ghost. So here they are brightening the house again and I promise to look after them more carefully.

I didn't include any of the six morning glory plants into this picture as they aren't properly flowering yet. I hope to plant them in containers on the steps outside the patio doors and get them to climb all over the frames I will construct for them, as I did in former years. I will also add some climbing nasturtiums as well as a new yellow flowered climber which the garden centre assistant persuaded me would be a suitable companion. Hopefully they will all be colouring our lives within a few weeks.