2) My World of Art & Gardening
SPRING & EARLY SUMMER 2026 UPDATE ~ I'm always amazed at how quickly time passes. It feels like no time at all since I launched this updated website, evolved from my original site, nartomioriginalart.com. Building it kept me busy throughout spring and into early summer, alongside plenty of other art-related projects — all of which I've loved being part of.
Alongside finding time to immerse myself in my own painting, I've been teaching my own watercolour flower painting class locally, 'Blooms Begin in Water'. I've also been preparing for and entering local exhibitions and art trails, including the Lindfield Art Trail a few weeks ago and the Attic Arts Exhibition in Ditchling this May.
My table at the Lindfield Art Trail in May this year.
When I first moved into my current home, the garden had virtually no flowers or shrubs to speak of. Over the past six years, I've slowly built up the green backdrop it has today. It made it through last winter well, but despite planting bulbs and numerous shrubs last autumn ~ all chosen to feed my colour palette for painting ~ this spring brought surprisingly little colour. A handful of Farmer Gracy tulips did emerge, their colours utterly delicious (pictured below), but of the many I planted, only a scattered few actually flowered.
Images of flowering tulips in my garden.
What I did get, unexpectedly, was a glorious show of fragrant white roses, spilling across the shed roof and side at the bottom of the garden and along the right-hand fence. The leggy shoots from these well-established roses I bent and trained into curves, and they rewarded me with an abundance of glowing, heavily-petalled white blooms. Adding to the display, a David Austin rose called Koko Loco has settled in beautifully at the end of one of the right-hand beds, its dusky pink flowers a real treat. Nearby, a large wisteria in a huge pot by the back door and a fabulous white jasmine and clematis on the left-hand side rounded out the display.
One disappointment this year: of the three peonies I planted two years ago, not a single one flowered even though they were beautiful last year.
Looking ahead to next spring, I've added a deep peach and a white camellia, along with a lilac and an early-flowering purple clematis, to the left-hand bed in hopes of bringing more colour. More seasoned gardeners have reassured me that the tulips and shrubs that didn't emerge this year may simply be doubling underground, ready to reappear next year. Fingers crossed!
