The Secret Garden Crochet Pattern - Review

"Look at those foxgloves, Elinor. I am so on trend. Vertical impact galore, my Dye Garden border is totally Chelsea."
"The stems aren't straight though, Beaut. The judges would mark you down for that."
This week, my companion and I have been glued to the TV coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Fabulous foxgloves are everywhere and half the designers seem to have been fretting over wiggles in their spikes. My foxgloves are just the ordinary kind, Digitalis purpurea, which self seed every summer. All I have to do is move the young plants to the spots where I fancy having flowers the following year.
Down at ground level, this year's weld and coreopsis plants are settling their roots in. My greatest gardening efforts go into raising dye plants from seed - Dyers' Chamomile is the only perennial in that border.

Earlier in the year, I went sorting through a pile of double knitting wool yarn I'd dyed with plants in previous summers. Lots of single skeins and no two shades quite the same. Small projects are all very well, but I find the preliminary chopping and changing and false starts can become wearing. It's good to have a bigger objective, something to fall back on when inspiration runs short. 

The Secret Garden by Catherine Bligh was a wonderful find amid the jungle of patterns on the Ravelry website. Inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett's book, the central squares of this crochet blanket show snowdrops and daffodils representing early spring, with successive circuits of squares working outwards to high summer with roses and lilies. Thrilled by the concept and delighted to find the pattern was available as a free Ravelry download, I pressed print and soon realised I'd need a file to keep the whole thing in order. Fifty pages of clearly illustrated and carefully written crochet instructions came spilling out of the printer.

Crochet may not be my forte, but even I can be gently led through the steps to create these delightful squares. The amount of work that Catherine Bligh has put into documenting and sharing her patterns is breathtaking. I sighed with satisfaction.
"I love this blanket, Elinor. Each flower is a new and absorbing puzzle."
"It takes you all evening to make the first one and by the time you've got it cracked and knocked out a few squares, you're on to a new flower."
"Wonderful, isn't it? I'll never get bored. A perfect way to celebrate my dye garden in a blanket of naturally dyed colours."
"Yours is hardly a Secret Garden."

Elinor remains far from convinced that it has been a good idea to take out more and more hedges and fencing to let in more sunlight. I'll admit, the neighbours do tend to stare at the sight of a small grey sheep doing yoga on the back lawn.
"It'll be more private when the sweet peas and beans have climbed up the trellis."
My companion sniffed.
"The central square of this blanket is supposed to show a key, but you don't even lock the back door at night."
"I shall adapt the daffodil square and make a camelia with silver birch bark dyed pink yarn. That's often the first colour we have in the garden as well as my first dye of the year."

"How are you getting on with your round of crocuses? Got that pattern sorted yet?"
"It took a few goes, but I can do the little squares by memory now."
"White ones, yellow ones ... you've done an awful lot of blue ones. What about the purple crocuses?"
"You know I don't grow any purple dyes. I'll have to miss them out."

"What's the next round going to be then?"
"Primroses and delphiniums."
"No delphiniums in this garden."
"Well, the same pattern square could work for other tall flower spikes that I do grow."
"What, like foxgloves?"
"Yes, exactly."
"Purple foxgloves. I thought you couldn't dye yarn purple." 
Lucky for me some of my foxgloves came out white. Lucky for me that Catherine Bligh is such a skilled and generous soul. It will take me a while and the finished blanket will be a hotchpotch of different yarns, but I'm enjoying crocheting every square, learning a lot and grateful for every page of instructions she wrote.