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(All images taken from my Pinterest HERE)

I feel like i am really appreciating this Summer.  Embracing it fully and taking each and every lovely thing it gives me.  The fruit and vegetables in season (for I am trying to better myself at eating what the world wants to give me when it does.  I am also learning how much better it all tastes too!), the extra hours of sunlight and as many flowers as i can fit into my messy mop!  What makes your summer summery?!  If you could bottle up all of what goes into your perfect summer, what would you pick?  Here are mine:  

1 Flowers as far as the eye can see!  Jam jars adorned with pretty pink and blousy peonies; wild flowers twisted in around windswept hair and floral printed cotton smock dresses worn with bare knees.

2  Eating outside whenever the chance occurs.  Salads dotted with edible flowers and torn up leftover chicken.  Crusty bread and homemade houmous.  Chopped raw vegetables for on the go munching!  Icy mineral water filled with chopped cucumber and torn up mint leaves.  Tomatoes, sweet from a little window-sill sunshine and eaten with crumbly cheese and chutney and oatcakes.  Baby new potatoes served warm with melted butter and chopped dill. Doesn't it all taste so much more wonderful outdoors?!

3 Sunshine! Freckled arms and noses and the sweet scent that a day in the sun leaves on your skin.  The most golden sunsets that you could ever imagine and the prettiest shadows dancing along the grass of an evening.  Mornings that you wake up naturally refreshed, rested and ready to go and days that feel like they last forever and ever and the kind that you don't want to end anyway!  

4  The seaside!  Salty air and windswept hair, bleached gently in the coastal sun.   Bare feet on warm sand and the feeling of the waves lapping at your toes.  The smell of coconut sunscream.  Salty chips on an evening wander along a harbour.

5  Any kind of bike ride at any time of the day.  Whilst autumn and winter rides are all kinds of beautiful, it feels like the days hold much more opportunity through the late spring and summer months.  Mornings are lighter, bike rides can be squeezed in before the rest of the world wakes, when the world is still and it's just you and a swallow or two.  You can be back home, and curled up with plenty of time for hot Lady Grey and warm buttered toast before you have to start your day properly.  Evening bike rides are just as indulgent.  There is nothing like riding bare-legged through that extra special golden hour sunshine.  The air feels cooler but heavy with the smell of damp wild flowers and wild lavender.  It's magical.  

I could quite happily go on and on but i'd like to know yours!  What to you, means that summer is here?!  And what's making you smile because of it?!