Life must be filled up

The trees are in full, fresh green leaf, candles on the horse chestnuts, cow parsley and hawthorn in the hedgerows and they’re playing cricket up at the Sports and Social club (which everyone calls the cricket club). It must be spring. You’d think I’d lived long enough not to be surprised by spring but I am, every year. It seems that one day, the garden is full of daffodils and primroses and the next, the daffodils are all deadheaded, the primroses fading and the Aquilegias and foxgloves starting to stand tall.
Here’s what’s in flower now. I should have gone round with a notebook but this is just from memory.
Shrubs. Japonica (Chaenomeles, quince) is almost over. The tree peony over and done. A white clematis which I thought was dead. Weigela. Azalea starting. The pale pink cistus which grew so much bigger than I expected it to. Climbing roses with fewer buds than they had last year, Berberis with yellow flowers.
Perennials. Erigeron karvinskianus (slashed to the ground earlier in the year) in beds and paving cracks. Hardy geraniums. Geum bulgaricum. Gladiolus byzantinus (which never showed last year) has its first flower open. Lily of the Valley, another plant I thought I’d lost, is no longer filling a bed and spreading everywhere but has formed an orderly line and started to flower. London Pride, another which shrivelled last year (and I thought they were indestructible!) is flowering, if in smaller clumps than before. Aquilegias are flowering, purples, pinks, whites; all self-seeded, nothing fancy. Foxgloves taller every day and some showing colour. Solomon’s Seal now in full flower. Pulonarias. The totally tough perennial cornflowers. A basket which I put together a while ago and has been living in the greenhouse, is now getting a daily airing before being hung up for the summer.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
I must have quoted this many times in my journal but it’s always true.

There was a strange weather phenomenon yesterday. In the afternoon we had a thunderstorm, with rain bucketing down, When I went to draw the upstairs curtains in the evening, a layer of mist was hovering over the field next door. I could see my garden clearly but beyond that, just the tops of trees in the distance. Weird and beautiful.

Driving home a couple of days ago, I was struck by how quickly everything has turned green. And the cow parsley is out! Just what May should be. In the garden, though, all is not well. I reckon we’re about a month behind a ‘normal’ year. I can tell this because it should be Chelsea time and the right flowers are not out. This is mainly due to cold and lack of sun. I’ve only ventured out to bring in the bins this morning and the wind was biting! How can the poor plants thrive?

I’ve already mentioned the shrivelled hydrangea. I have a Clematis montana on a fence, a plant I’ve always thought was tough as old boots. I keep noticing that the only green on the fence is from ivy creeping in from the field. Seeing nothing but white wood, I thought the whole thing was dead; closer inspection shows a few leaves, shrivelled up like those on the hydrangea. Last year, the whole fence was covered in pink flowers. Will I see any this year? Then there’s the hardy fuchsia, which should be four feet tall by the end of summer. When I went to prune it, I could see no buds on it at all. I was ruthless and cut it right down. Yesterday, I noticed one new shoot at the base, so I may be lucky. The other main problem is all those plants in the greenhouse which should be hardening off. I haven’t the heart to put the poor things outside in the cold wind.

Thank you, plants which flourish whatever the weather: primroses, aquilegias, osteospermums (although the flowers only open in sun), perennial cornflower, spurges and that wonderful plant Erysimum ‘Bowles’ Mauve’, which is covered in flowers and glows violet at dusk. The garden is full of foxgloves again this year but although I think of them as a ‘Chelsea’ flower, they are way off flowering yet. Lily of the Valley and London Pride are flowering cheerfully as is a gorgeous Solomon’s Seal. What was I complaining about?

PS, after looking out of the window: hawthorn, quince, a Cerinthe which over-wintered and the first hardy geraniums.

So wrote Christopher Lloyd in one of his books. It certainly felt that way as I was driving along country roads this afternoon. There was a whole field full of lambs; I wished I could slow down to look at them. Every road was lined with Cow Parsley and there was even the occasional clump of bluebells. Chaucer got it right when he described the Squire: ‘as fressh as is the monthe of May.’

The whole garden is waterlogged and it’s very frustrating to see all the jobs which should have been done by now but will have to wait.
I just looked up my LJ entry for exactly one year ago. Not a single one of the plants featured in that post is flowering now or looking anywhere near doing so. This makes me all the more grateful for the daffodils and primroses which put up with all weathers and fill the garden with cheerfulness now. Let’s hope spring will come all in a rush.

After all my complaints about the bad weather we had down south over Easter, yesterday was nice and today is glorious. I cleaned the line and hung washing outside for the first time this year. I battled with BT to try to get a better deal out of them and succeeded. I started deadheading the daffodils. Then I did a lot of weeding. That was tiring so I sat in the sun (really warm!) and made these nifty plant supports out of hazel hedge prunings the gardener left behind. All that time in the Guides wasn’t wasted.



Yesterday I saw lambs in the fields; new life everywhere.

In my garden, the daffodils are just green spears biding their time. Down in town, where it’s warmer, there are fat buds. In the supermarkets, the ‘daffs pound a bunch’ season is here and aren’t they cheerful on a dark, windy morning?

I can be a proper grump at this time of year. While everyone else is raving about how wonderful the lighter evenings are, I’m complaining that longer, lighter evenings are freezing cold and it doesn’t seem decent to draw the curtains against daylight. There are things to enjoy, though. First, the way the daffodils and primroses which now fill the garden glow palely in the dusk. Second, hearing a blackbird singing in the early evening. This poem by John Drinkwater was a favourite of mine when I was a child. I mentally transposed it to our own suburban garden and felt it summed up the time of year.

Blackbird

He comes on chosen evenings,
My blackbird bountiful, and sings
Over the garden of the town
Just at the hour the sun goes down.
His flight across the chimneys thick,
By some divine arithmetic,
Comes to his customary stack,
And couches there his plumage black,
And there he lifts his yellow bill,
Kindled against the sunset, till
These suburbs are like Dymock woods
Where music has her solitudes,
And while he mocks the winter's wrong
Rapt on his pinnacle of song,
Figured above our garden plots
Those are celestial chimney-pots.

It was sunny(ish) this afternoon and much warmer than yesterday, so I took myself out. Just up the road I found myself following a genuine red vardo drawn by a horse with lovely feathered feet. Far from being annoyed by the delay, drivers were beaming, and a couple waved from their front garden. Parked at the garden centre was a lovingly preserved MG Midget covered with badges; I gazed at it in admiration for quite a while. It felt quite spring-like and I wandered round looking at plants which I used to have in my old garden and had to tell myself strictly that I have no room for in my new one. I can resist the resin garden animal ornaments but if I could think where to put it I’d buy a small gothic mirror like this to create some garden magic. It was cheaper locally. aellia, I think you’d have loved some of this stuff.

Back home in my garden I saw lots of jobs crying out to be done and some dead plants in the greenhouse. More encouragingly, in flower now are: cherry tree, primroses, snowdrops, pulmonarias, miniature daffodils, hellebores, bergenia, a few crocus, including the large purple one which comes up in solitary splendour each year, and Erysimum ‘Bowles’ Mauve’, which is almost never out of flower. Pleasingly, my erythronium plants are showing shoots. I can almost believe in spring.

After nearly two weeks of grey skies, mist and rain, this afternoon we had what people call ‘a borrowed day’, a proper spring day in what is still winter. It was warm enough in the sun to garden comfortably, without any spiteful wind to drive you indoors again. I was able to do some more spring cleaning of the garden, mostly cutting down dead stems and removing debris. It’s amazing the difference a little warmth makes. Snowdrops have been out for a while, and so have pulmonarias. Hellebores, which just a couple of days ago were hanging ragged heads, have opened pink and clear. A few daffodils are showing colour and the first tulip shoots have burst through the soil. The mysterious solitary crocus, the very one in today’s icon, has opened bright and imperial. In a very sheltered spot there’s even a grape hyacinth in flower. As for that wonderful plant, Erysimum ‘Bowles’ Mauve’, it still has a few flowers with buds promising more; I felt it deserved to be tidied up. Of course, weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; but they’ll have to wait for another day.

Not before my little room but in a garden up the road. It really does feel more like May than April. There’s a green haze over the hawthorn hedges, the May is fading, fields suddenly look as though a giant paintbrush has given them a green colour wash. People laugh at the British habit of flinging off clothes at the first warmth in the sun but hey, given the past two years, this could *be* summer, so we should jolly well enjoy it.
This is the current view from my bedroom window.