Tea on Tuesday and reflections from the weekend

We had some friends come for Sunday supper. It's always so lovely, to catch up with friends.These days I'm thinking that spring can't come too soon.Sunday morning, while I was shopping for groceries, I bought some tulips and daffodils to "spring the house up". Later, I used my colourful and crazy Bopla plates on the table. Enough of the sombre winter hues.In the garden, the only fresh green is the ivy and the rosemary. I keep looking into the shade garden for signs of snowdrops and crocuses. They're coming. :)Today Chloe and her school mate Brianna had to work out a business proposal for a client and I offered to make us a big, sunny salad nicoise for lunch.As I was boiling the beans grown in Mexico and tearing up the hot-house grown lettuce and spinach, I thought back to our Sunday supper and tomatoes imported from California. It'll be good to have some fresh greens growing in the cold frame and in my garden.To that end, I brought out some of my vintage gardening books while I had a cup of tea.I chose this sweet, little Lady's Slipper cup. Doesn't it look so very sophisticated and exotic? It's Merlin Ware by Royal Stafford china.And opened some of my books to the coldframe pages. My ancient coldframe needs a bit of repair because the wooden sides are rotting and I'm going to have to do that rather soon because I couldn't resist buying some seeds from one of my favourite seed supplier, the Hudson Valley Seed Library. I suspect that veg and flowers seeds are probably the same from one supplier to the next, but you've got to love a company who hires artists to design the seed packets, don't you?I was thinking that it would be lovely to grow a lady's slipper orchid in the shade garden. There are seeds available on line actually. I wonder how hard that would be. I have seen some orchids in the forests around my cabin, but not this one.So I'm sitting here sipping some Lady Gray tea, (because which other tea would one have in a Lady's Slipper cup?) and listening to a finch singing outside in the dreary, foggy coolness that is our last few days of January, and willing spring on.Oh, and I remembered that I promised a post of the new springed-up living room mantle. Post coming tomorrow then. :)Sharing with Terri and Martha and Sandi and Bernideen.