The Garden Party - 2018

Each year at the Lytham St Annes Embroiderers Guild optimistic plans are made to have a Garden Party. This may be no biggie if you live in a country where you can rely on the weather but in Britain despite, global warming and the recent pretty much yearly heat waves this last decade, we still have an almost ingrained pessimism regarding our weather. 
We enjoy our short summers and joyfully go about minus coat and brolly - but we are never taken aback by a 'surprise' rainstorm or barrage of hail amid weeks of drought.... its that kind of country. 

However, a garden party is still a very genteel and 'English' thing to do and we love the images of sitting in a sunny garden, dressed in flowing romantic dresses, sipping tea from china cups and nibbling on a delicately a pretty baked confection. 
Determined to 'live this dream' we plan ahead but always have a back up plan to go inside in case of rain.

Despite having rain and windy days all the previous week bringing ending our wonderful (for us not the plants)  warm and lovely sun filled heatwave - I for one refused to believe that the day would be anything other than fine.

In fact it was HOT 

Too hot for the cakes they had to go inside! Arriving late, I just had time to grab a slice of chocolate cake and a cuppa before they had to be whisked inside to save them from melting.

I did manage to snap a couple of pics of us all sat in the beautiful garden that had beds stacked with flowers of all colours and varieties, that had been lovingly tended by the house/garden owner.(did not get to photo those, sorry. Too busy munching on cake at the same time as filling out the quiz - thank you H for compiling it for us).

Here we all are, above, marking our Quizzes. The quiz was very though provoking and brought back many memories as we discussed the possible answers - not being very competitive, its more for a bit of fun along with a Free Raffle.
You can just see the edge of the decking and the sprout patch behind on the left of the photo. Some camera shy people must have been hiding as there were more of us than this :-)

Here is another shot of the veggie garden - I was quite taken by how big the sprouts and kale was and how well it had grown encouraged by the week of showers.

A big thank you to our Hosts for the afternoon, K and R for opening their home and garden to us and running back and forth with cups of tea. We all had a lovely relaxing couple of hours - one or two of us even wore a dress for the occasion but no hats not even a sun bonnet to be seen :-) Thank you once again - we are already looking forward to eating en plein air next August.