A Scanian Tulip Garden

We visited a neighboring village last week, and stopped to admire this really incredible tulip garden. There were tulips of every color in a blanket across the whole front yard, with paths winding through.

The woman who owned the home, the gardener, noticed us and invited us in to look around.

So many colors!

In the summer her garden is full of peonies, she invited us back to see it then too.

These tulips were over 20 years old.

These were SwedeGirl's favorite, pink of course!

What an incredible labor of love.

She fertilizes with bone meal and cow manure fresh from the farmer, and shops discount bulb sales whenever she can!

She has been recognized ofr her talents, and was featured in a Swedish garden magazine

In the back yard, she showed us this Scanian Coffee corner. It is traditional construction for southern Sweden, where it gets very windy (and there are lots of rocks!). A border of stone in a circle, to protect from wind and hold the heat of the sun to create radiant warmth.

So pretty and clever.

She puts a cheap fatty piece of meat up in this old lantern to feed predator birds in the winter. There was a huge beautiful bird when we were in the village, twice as big or beautiful as any hawk I have ever seen around here before. It was so big and regal it made us wonder if it was a condor or eagle or something! I am not sure what it was, but we think this was one of the fellows she feeds.

The stone wall of the coffee corner is hollow and is a root cellar.

I love root cellars, I so want to build one here.

This amazing curly Q wood is called worm Hazel. She got three and a half kilos of hazel nuts from this tree last year. It flowers yellow very early, and looks best in winter when the shape of the branches are most clearly visible. I bet it looks so cool in front of a white snowy background.
The twists of the branches