I left my heart at...

...Parco Burcina, a landscape garden in Piedmont region (Italy), founded in the mid-19th century by Giovanni Piacenza, a wool industrialist, and situated in the Municipalities of Biella and Pollone.

I must go back sometimes... to visit my heart and to take more and better photos. Oh, I wish I had had a digital camera when I was living in Italy!

We visited the park in May many years ago; that day it had been raining before we arrived and the air was fresh and fragrant with scents from the grand conifers of the park. The valley of rhododendrons is stunning. On the internet, you can find many photos (much, much better than these!) depicting the valley from above, but imagine yourself rambling among the shrubs, surrounded by all those colours...

By myself, I followed a path leading to the top of the hill. Noisy schoolchildren and other visitors were left far behind, and I found serene small meadows and young birches with leaves of the most delicate green.  

The colours and light  are particularly bad in the photo below, but it shows the position of the park on a hill.

We saw pleasant views also on our way back home. Oasi Zegna is a freely accessible nature park in the Biella Alps. It was created by the entrepreneur Ermenegildo Zegna, founder of the homonymous factory that makes men's clothing and accessories.

Some old photos taken in our garden (in Italy):

Awful colours, but dear memories:

One of my favourites, Azalea japonica 'Palestrina':

♥

From start to success :)

The topic of the first MakroTex challenge of this year is BEGINNING. I decided to choose a gardening theme.

In the beginning, there's a dream, fed by emotions, history and memories... and by books, magazines and catalogues... :)

Then there's much work.

Source: Internet

Knowledge, skills and good luck would be useful as well - and yet success is not guaranteed. :)

MakroTex-haasteen aiheena on tällä viikolla ALKU. Koetin keksiä, miten teemaan voisi yhdistää puutarhakuvia. 

Alussa on ideoita ja haaveita, joita sitten yritetään toteuttaa... 

Tämän postauksen kuvat eivät ole uusia. Mukana on jopa kaksi paperikuvasta skannattua kuvaa ja allaolevista "unelmakuvista" osa on Italiasta.

Wisteria floribunda 'Longissima Alba'

Robinia pseudoacacia

Laburnum anagyroides

"If the plan doesn't work,

change the plan, not the goal."

Happy New Year!

Onnellista uutta vuotta!

"Good Looking Cooking" and other memories

I

Cleaning the house before Easter, I found some old stuff I had either forgotten completely or been looking for for some time.

Certain pages of an old issue of Vogue (UK) belong to the second group. My love for country-style kitchens may have started with this photo:

"For those that long for gentler days

When things were done the proper way

There is our third and last design

Which also uses friendly pine.

But this is built of weathered wood

Which passing time has made look good

And it can boast a smart alliance

With every new and neat appliance.

Combining a nostalgic look

With all things for the modern cook."

In a (rare) (crazy?) moment of decluttering, I have thrown away the magazine (from the 1980s, I believe) and kept only the two pages with the photo and the rhyme. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of the writer, but the photographer is David Montgomery and the "sets were arranged by Hilary Green".

II

This small accordion photo book belongs to the first group. It's probably from the end of the 1960s, those good old days much before digital cameras and the Internet.

III

Browsing through my old, scanned photos, I found two I wanted to share with you today... Oh, those unforgettable moments by the sea. How I love listening to the waves at night!

IV

This swallowtail (an Iphiclides podalirius perhaps?) is the biggest butterfly I've seen in Europe.

Added later: This photo was taken in Italy.

V

The last glimpse of the tulips 'Sweet Desire'. Someone said the petals looked like silk and they certainly did, especially when the flowers got older. Bye bye, Sweeties, till we meet again next year!

Sharing with Five on Friday

and

wishing a happy and sunny weekend to all

with this photo taken by the correspondent of "My Woodland Garden" in London. :)
Thank you, M.!

♥

A wish, a dream, and a promise

A good title, isn't it? (It brings to my mind The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.)  The title and this post have been inspired by the lovely post Toive, unelma ja lupaus vuodelle 2016 (and the related challenge) on the wonderful Ruusunmekko Garden blog. Many Finnish garden bloggers have already written posts about their wishes for the new gardening year... posts accompanied by truly enchanting photos.

I have been posting almost every day recently. I still wanted to publish this post, because it has been waiting for some time already. Now I'll slow down and concentrate on visiting and commenting...

Dreams are pink (and rosy), aren't they?

At the moment, I wish especially that the plants (mine and yours) would survive this harsh and capricious winter. The temperatures have been around -30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) for quite a while and and in the beginning there was very little snow. We are lucky to live near a lake, however; there was a layer of snow (very light and fluffy) on the ice, and armed with a snow shovel, a large plastic tub and a pink plastic sled, I collected some to protect the most delicate plants. I had tried to protect them using dry leaves, burlap etc., but the weather conditions have been more challenging than expected. Fortunately, we finally received some more snow.

We'll see. Gardeningwise, last spring and summer weren't very successful  and one was hoping for a better year. Otherwise,  I will need to start to recycle old photos from the previous years (oh no!).

I'm dreaming of my present/future garden looking a little bit like my previous garden, lush and vigorous, but also something more... magical. A garden with climbing roses, hidden meadows with wildflowers, and secret paths out to the woodland beyond. A garden where fairies come at light summer nights and plant seeds picked from distant enchanted forests and where in moonlit winter nights wood sprites and hares dance in a circle. :)

I promise to try to choose the right plants to the right place, considering our climate, the soil, light requirements, the cold and wind tolerance... and I  promise to ignore this promise if, in my pursuit of beauty, I meet something completely irresistible, like honeysuckles. I promise, however, to try to make all my plants happier.

♥

Even though the new year is already well on its way, it's good to pause and reflect on the goals to set for the next months.

Many of you already know Donna's inspiring blog Living From Happiness. Just before the New Year, Donna chooses a word to guide her through the coming year. Her word for this year is "Innovate". You can read her thoughts about inspiration, change, and creativity for example in these interesting posts: Innovation in 2016 and My Manifesto: An Innovative Life in 2016.

"For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." (T.S. Eliot)

♥

Wishing you bright and cheerful winter days...

as well as beautiful but not too hot days

to the friends on the southern side of the globe!

Old photos, old hues

Happy new week to everyone!

Browsing through my photo files, I came across this group of old, scanned photos. The colours are a little bit strange, but I decided not to worry - on the contrary, I enhanced the tones to create a slightly old-fashioned effect.

♥

Participating in Mosaic Monday # 40

at Lavender Cottage Gardening.

Thank you, Judith, for hosting!

Tomorrow I will post lots of photos taken in these days. Spring seems to have come rather early in Southern and Western Finland, but here in Eastern Finland it's late... It'll probably be short. So let's make the most of it! Today the weather is chilly and it's raining again, but my day hasn't been useless: I have planted a tree...

♥

Pink (blogging) dreams

Today I would have liked to share with you photos of this year's first seed packets, but they haven't arrived yet. Fortunately, I found these tulips at our grocery store. Then I was having fun with Picasa:

This is the post No. 103 of My Woodland Garden. I was hoping to celebrate the 100th post with a short commentary, but sometimes life just gets in the way.  Well, today there is time for a few words about blogging...

I had been admiring many, many garden blogs already for some time before I had the idea to start one of my own.  I started writing posts in April 2014, and because I wanted to have several of them for the future readers, I made the blog public only in September. (Perhaps not the best of strategies.)

Without the help of some lovely, more experienced bloggers, the beginning of my path as a blogger would have been much, much rougher, if not impossible. You can find the blogs of these wonderful women in my blogroll... and on a future occasion I would like to thank them more openly as well, for all their support, good advice, and kind comments.

You may have noticed that some changes have been made in this blog recently. I had finally noticed that I'm a no-reply blogger, not intentionally, and when starting to fix this, I also decided to "revert to Blogger Profile".  When I started blogging, a Google+ account was created automatically.  It has some very interesting features, but to me it has brought more disadvantages than advantages: At least in Finland, it doesn't seem to be much used, some bloggers find blogs connected to a Google+ account somehow dubious, and sometimes people don't even notice there is a blog "behind" the G+ profile.

I hope people will now find this blog more easily...  I have had several new followers and commenters recently. A hearty welcome to you all!

I haven't decided yet what to do with the G+ account. In any case, a huge thank you to those that became my "followers" there.  I would be more than happy if you could consider joining this blog.

In a way, it's a pity that I started blogging only now. In the earlier years of my life, I was travelling much more and living in very interesting places, also gardeningwise. I think, however, that even in a not-so-zazzy life there are many beautiful things to share with other people.

I also started taking digital photos only rather recently, since I was much attached to my old film SLR with its many lenses, flashes, etc. Now I must of course admit that with a digital camera, photographing has become more gratifying. Some of the few photo prints looked good in those days, but now...

Except for those of the tulips, the pictures of this post are old photos from our garden in Italy. Below you can see a Wisteria that was (and still is) growing  near our covered garden gate:

Its abundant blooming (seen from the street) covers the gate and the wrought iron fence. The photo is in b/w, because it was taken in harsh midday sunlight, and my editing skills are not enough to fix the horrible colours! :)

After some hesitation, I have also added the Translate button. I have noticed Google Translate works rather well with language pairs like English-Italian and English-Swedish.  Finnish, however, with its particular syntactical and morphological features, causes more difficulties. Some translated sentences are almost unintelligible. One of the most unfortunate examples is that the English "do visit x!" is translated into Finnish as if it were "do not visit x!"...

(Oh, I just remembered an amusing link shared last year! To all those interested in languages: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/72936-english-swedish-german-and-finnish-decline-dog/)

That's all for now. Thank you for your visit!

♥

Joining Judith for Mosaic Monday.

For more mosaics, visit her lovely blog!

♥