Well I don’t think I can surpass that, but these delicious fighting cupids are a close second …certainly ‘native’ to MY fancy!

Spring time last year found Nicky and I busing with a dozen like minded ladies around the Czech Republic reaping the visual beauty, and I confess there were a few tears of joy to be had.

Mine, and those of these weeping putti who graced the plinths enclosing a charming little cemetery name now alas forgotten.

Can you even bare it?

And then I started to think if somewhere in the world perhaps there is a ‘weeping garden’…one where all the flowers and foliage trail and weep like the willows of Wilkes Water at Nicky’s Hunting Lodge.

And weeping cherry trees…

And the roses that begin to fall and drift come late summer on the Kings Road.

Of course it would be replete with Weeping May.

And waterfalls of flowering trees in Koinup’s paintings……wouldn’t THAT be divine.

Now that the sun’s come out of hiding, I can turn my thoughts and hand to my garden at the Hunting Lodge. And be inspired by Hugh Cavendish’s fascinating book on his gardens at Holker Hall, a magical stretch of land set almost on the sea near the vastly tidal Morecambe Bay….with the combination of glistening sands and Cumbrian peaks it is breathtaking.

Called ‘A Time to Plant’, Lord Cavendish’s book, with ravishing photographs by his wife Grania, is anything but a dry ‘How - to’, more a quite gossipy reminiscence of how the garden grew, and the characters that created it, with Hugh’s unconventional likes and dislikes thrown in.

We all have things in our gardens with the Latin name Hookeriana in them. This book shows joyfully why and how beautifully they grew in this, their original home.

Doesn’t get much ‘cooler’ than tattooed sidewalks now does it??

Shots taken in Paris on the Left Bank

Stalking Cocteau in St Jean Cap Ferrat….and I thought I’d seen it all.

I must have walked by this SO many times over the years….always bustling and buzzy with my own thoughts I suppose, and running to client meetings perhaps.

At the moment I’m enjoying St Jean Cap Ferrat on vacation, and low and behold even the shadows look Cocteau-esque to me………