Open Garden, spring flowers and making linen, Sunday, 17 May 2026

Today the garden is part of the National Garden scheme. The proceeds we collect go to charity. When I arrive, I am surprised by the number of children with their parents. It is good to see us busy. The ukulele players are not here today. They felt they would take up too much room but I feel it is a pity as they are a welcoming sound on a Sunday morning. Tea and coffee is available, the hot water boiled using the energy from our solar panels.

It is chilly. We can’t see any tadpoles in the pond. They are there but being cold blooded are less active in this cold weather.

We have had some rain this week. Very welcome, but the ground is still very dry; the deficit has not been made up. The wild flowers in the wild flower bed are slow to get going, a summation of cold and dryness. We might see some flowering come June. There is borage and marigolds but these are plants from last year. The borage leaves have a white mould on every leaf.

The old reliables, geums and marigolds flower on. But some flowers don’t last long. The paeonies lasted a week and are now fading, and the pond irises are past their best with just a few still in flower. Lavender is coming up, soon to flower, as is the acanthus with its tall spikes. The leaves will tell you the weather we have been having. If they are stripped back then it has been wet for a while. But if they are not, the snails haven’t got going. In wet weather the snails are merciless on the acanthus, massacring the leaves.

The flax is doing well. It’s about a foot high, and I have to take off the wire grid over it. The grid had been put there to stop foxes. All I can do now is put the grid around the bed, and hope to deter them from digging up the bed. The flax will be ready to harvest, say by end of June. Making linen from flax is new to me, so I have watched some videos on YouTube so I know the steps of taking flax to linen. And I find it absolutely daunting. Growing the flax is the easy bit, so much has to be done post harvesting, that I am amazed it ever got going. Here are the stages:

1. First we have harvesting. The whole plant, along with roots, are pulled out of the soil.

2. The plant is now dried. They can be made into stooks and dried in the sun. This is reminiscent of harvesting wheat back in the day. I once helped out on an organic form, forty years ago. No combine harvester. Once the wheat was cut and bound, it was stood in stooks to dry. The very term, stooks, is reminiscent of old time farming.

3. Then we have the rippling and threshing stage, in which the plant is drawn through a comb to take off the seeds and leaves.

4. Retting is the next stage. The stalks are submerged in water for a week. This is to soften the plant gums which attach the woody core to the fibres. We need to get rid of that core. It’s the outer fibres we want.

5. Then follows breaking and scrutching, which breaks the inner wood, making it easier to get the fibres off.

6. Hackling is the next stage. The stalks are drawn through nails to draw off the fibre. Several passes, through tighter nails. This leaves us with strands of fibre, looking like blonde hair, from which we get the term, flaxen hair.

7. Now spinning. The strands are spun together to make them strong enough for weaving. If we had a lot, we would use a spinning wheel, but there are simpler ways for small amounts which we will need to investigate.

8. And lastly, weaving. Ours will be very small scale, without a loom, just to make a little cloth.

The above I find quite exhausting to contemplate, let alone do. But step by step, and hope we can get there and end up with a little linen by September.