Garden Inspiration

I am so excited, my second book Torie Jayne's Stylish Home Sewing from Cico books launches next week. So I thought I would give you my readers a sneak peek at my garden projects in my new sewing book and share with you my colour inspiration behind all the garden projects in my book. My new garden!

This time last year I was planning out my new sewing book, I started by creating inspirational mood boards for different parts of my new home. Which of course included my new garden. I knew from the beginning I wanted to create a cottage style garden, to match the style of the house. I narrowed down the key elements I liked to include an informal design of dense plantings, a mixture of ornamental and edible plants, perennials, evergreens and annuals, painted wood and natural materials, but most of all to have grace and charm.

So after pouring over images of gardens, plants and flowers and reading a lovely vintage book on romantic gardens, pinning my favourite pics to my 'Country Garden Flowers' Pinterest board, it soon became clear that I wanted to plant lots of white, mauve, lilac, lavender and blue coloured flowers. I liked the idea of white adding a lovely calming effect and brightening dark corners and a multitude of purple shades adding colour yet keeping the whole look tranquil.

Unfortunately my new garden was an overgrown mess, the only saving grace was I had a newly painted white and mint summer house that I had started to give a makeover to. More on that later...

I had enough to go on with my mind buzzing full of ideas on how I imagined my new garden could look so I started to pull colour ideas together and got sowing lots of seeds so there would be flowers in my garden in time for the photo shoot...

As the garden was such a mess, I started by working around the Summer House as I thought it would be the best backdrop for the sewing projects I was working on for the book. I was delighted with the final shot for Torie Jayne's Stylish Home Sewing and had so much fun styling the shoot with photographer Sussie Bell...

Now I am continuing to work on the rest of the garden, all of which I will of course share here...