I indulged myself over the last two weeks with featuring just one of the two lotus ponds on the balcony on each Saturday. But there was good reason for this, for from April on, which is when I resumed coverage as it were of these ponds, they both produced blossoms in profusion. This week too I have to concentrate on ...

I was so delighted by the roses I had bought from the old man who had set up shop in Ingiriya that I was determined to get some more from him. He was not there when I dropped in at his shop last week, but his wife was as helpful, and I bought two plants with lovely blossoms. They were ...

Lots and lots of lotus blossoms last week from the small pond on the balcony, and this week, so enamoured am I of these, there will be lots and lots from the bigger pond, the one half under the roof, where the many angels born nearly a year ago greet me each morning, clustering around the food I scatter in ...

Soon after I got back from England I decided that I wanted still more roses for the roof garden. It was clear the barbaton daisies were not working in the corner bed in the south west of the garden, and when I found the rose Anuruddha gave me doing well there, I thought I might as well dedicate that bed ...

I have spent many weeks on the fish in my different tanks and ponds, so I thought it was time now to get back to flowers. It was with the ponds with lotuses on the balconies that I began this series, and since I have not looked at them for well over four months I thought I should show some ...

It is time now to get back to my roof garden, which I last wrote about in June. That post appeared while in fact I was in England, and then when I got back I wrote for a few weeks about the balcony, before moving down to the main garden and its trees and flowers. I realize it is time ...

I have mentioned previously the little white fish I transferred upstairs, to the second tank on the balcony, under the seat on the eastern side. In returning today to these fish, to talk about them in detail, I have a sad story to relate, in contrast to the successful transfer to the temple flower pond down below, where there are ...

Since very few of the pictures I had tried to post appeared this morning, I reproduce them here, beginning with a pink temple flower, and two of them in the penultimate picture. Then you have a red crab claw and an orange one, and then the new bed on the other side of the house. Finally, though this was not ...

I realize that, in talking about my actual garden, I have concentrated on its trees, old ones and new. Hardly any of them flower, so that there has in fact been no colour in my pictures except for the ehala blossoms at the beginning, and temple flowers, but those I showed were on my driveway, for the tree in the ...

I mentioned last week the birth and progress of the white fish that now dominate the pond with the waterfall (which I have not operated for the last several months given the danger to the babies). They are now positioned in three other ponds in the garden, and also in one of the new tanks on the balcony, and in ...

The other tree that had died by the time my little garden was set up, at the very end of 2016, was the mango tree which would have been on my side had my sister and I divided the land in the middle. But she wanted the entire longer section of the drawing room, which I thought well worth granting ...

I have largely in this series celebrated my flowers and my fish, though I have also noted the sorrows of the whole exercise. Flowers of course fade, and that is not a problem for new blossoms emerge, but sometimes that does not happen and the plant dies. And even sadder is the death of fish with whom I have grown ...

I have written over four weeks about the trees and the shrubs that flourish in my garden, while dealing only cursorily with those that were there long ago, but had died before the garden was created, back in 2018. I have however mentioned the temple flower tree round which there is now a pond, but I should say more about ...

With the new fish in place in the little pond under the eastern flower bed on the balcony, I decided to build a little vantage point, for the step from which one accessed the stair to the roof garden was too small to sit on comfortably and too high to see properly into the pool. So I had a little ...

I wrote last week about two of the trees I planted in my garden in December 2021, an ambarella and a mango tree. Both are doing well, though this is not the case with the another I planted at the same time. This was a pomegranate tree which did well to start with, but has been static for some time. ...

The two angels I had moved from the big pond to the smaller one on the balcony had initially seemed happy, along with the red and pink fish that had been there almost from the start. But I had noticed just before the catastrophe that they did not come up so readily for food as they had initially done, and ...

I have shown in the last couple of weeks tall trees in my garden and my driveway, including one planted relatively recently, the kohomba tree that is now higher than the balcony and even the roof garden. But a couple of years back I planted more trees there, having been sent a whole set of plants by a friend. Five ...

But I never saw those angels again clearly. For when I cam back, in February, though I could see black fish at the bottom of that little tank, I could not be sure which they were, angels or the original inhabitants. And as the days passed, and I saw just three black shapes, which came to the surface as they ...

In moving down last week to my actual garden, I showed the flowering ehala tree, which continues to be the most colourful feature of the place, as it was before that garden on the south was truncated. And then I showed temple flowers, but on the driveway to the north, since the one in my little walled garden had died. ...

When I found such a large number of angels in the large lotus pond, the growth of whom I showed last week, I decided, never being able to leave alone, that there should be another little tank for some of them. For when I sit on the little seat against the south wall that separates the balcony from the staircase, ...