Afternoon Tea

It's been a very relaxing Sunday, pootling around in the garden, working on my current stitchscape, popping round to my Grandmother's house to wander around her garden, and an afternoon tea to top it all off!

The garden is looking particularly lovely and colourful at the moment. We have sunflowers in the garden that are truly enormous!!! Some of them are just about reaching the bedroom windows now and still haven't flowered so could go higher.

We specially planted some 'Bee' sections in the garden this year as we do love our Bees, using some mixed seed sachets designed to attract the bumbly little creatures. Some of the flowers I don't recognise, but we have a lot of Borage, Cornflowers and Californian Poppies, along with other Poppy-esque flowers and some fluffy purple things that look amazing.
There are also a lot of Geraniums as Dad really likes them, and Fuchsias as they were on offer in a garden centre a couple of months ago. Many of these have really taken off and produced all manner of flouncy, voluminous flowers with brilliantly coloured petal skirts.

As well as attracting many species of Bee, we also have a lot of Butterflies enjoying the fine weather and abundance of flowers. It's nice to be able to provide a garden like this for them.

My afternoon tea was at Ashdown Park Hotel & Country Club, and was a belated birthday present from myself and another friend gifted to two of our friends (I must remember to give more presents that I can benefit from myself). The setting was absolutely delightful, we were seated quite informally on squashy sofas around low tables and the cake stand ceremoniously brought in after a lot of faffing with teapots and strainers and hot or cold milk jugs. I could get used to having a posh afternoon tea on a regular basis.

The whole experience, my first at a posh hotel, was very sweet, and we pretended to be posh whilst nibbling on our crustless finger sandwiches, tasting the orange cheesecake square or mini fruit tartlet, spreading the cream and jam onto our scones and having the Cornwall versus Devon debate for the umpteenth time.

Having completely stuffed ourselves with cakes we had a quick wander outside, walking down to the pond and standing on the jetty watching the fish swim rather hopefully underneath us.

It is a very pretty place to go and have afternoon tea, especially when the sun is shining. There were quite a few parties going on in various areas of the grounds, and you can hold weddings here in their little chapel. I especially enjoyed leaving past the row of Hydrangea bushes on our way to the car park, such a glorious sight!