Life must be filled up

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.

This evening's view, looking towards Badbury Rings.

Today there was a book sale at Upton House. It's not far to go and there was Blackthorn in the hedges, lambs in the fields and a haze of young green on the oak trees. The book sale was very quiet and friendly. Some people carried boxes and exchanged shy, conspiratorial smiles with other box carriers; smiles which meant, 'I am a bookaholic and so are you'. The grounds are lovely and there are some pictures after the cut. ( Read more... )

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring -
When weeds, on wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hurrah, I am in love with gardening again. For weeks I have been looking out of the windows without the slightest desire to do any of the myriad tasks awaiting me and reflecting gloomily that I would probably never garden again. This morning I went into the (cold) greenhouse to find it warm and steamy. I opened a vent and even watered some of the poor plants overwintering in there.

Ten days ago the folk at Kew were telling disappointed visitors that delayed spring warmth would mean that five million bulbs would all burst into bloom at once. This is certainly true here (not the five million, obviously) but all the daffodils are coming out together. No more supermarket daffs for me! Here's a rotten picture of miniature daffodils lining a little path:





I've forgotten what all these are called but here is strange, shaggy old 'Rip van Winkle':




The picture I've chosen for the latest usericon is of Corydalis lutea.  It's one of those plants you have for a while, lose, 
then it pops up somewhere else it would prefer to grow. Lovely ferny foliage and yellow flowers which last a long time. 
This is the season for acid yellows. Here is one of my favourites



Euphorbia characias 'Blue Hills'. The heads are drooping now, full of promise, then up they will perk for two months. 
Or how about this little oddity, which flowers right on the ground?




It is Hacquetia epipactis and I don't know how it survives in our soil. In the same shady corner is this little shrub, Daphne laureola:




This was grown from a seedling in the garden of a dear old friend, who was still gardening when he died, aged 96. I say gardening; actually he was whizzing around in a terrifying way on his mobility scooter, bossing me about while I did the gardening. There's more yellow from the catkins on the Corkscrew Hazel and the primroses everywhere, and purple from crocus and wood anemones.

This afternoon I actually went outside to work and was not put off when it began pouring with rain as soon as I had got the wheelbarrow out of the shed. I picked up a lot of litter and cut down Epimedium 'Sulphureum'.



Before



After
It looks terrible, but if you don't take off the top growth you will never see the flowers, which are curled up underneath and will stand up later. I love epimediums and have bought many choice varieties from the plantsman's favourite nursery, Blackthorn. I have lost almost all of them but E. 'Sulphureum' is tough as old boots and will grow in any old patch of garden where you think nothing will do. This specimen is in far too good a site, wasting soil and sun and will be chopped up and moved later. It's good to have plans!

Hopkins was right about the weeds. Hairy bittercress is everywhere, those little white flowers waiting to explode all over the garden. If a weed is a plant in the wrong place, is this Chionodoxa a weed? It has seeded itself into asphalt and comes up every year without fail.






Vita Sackville-West pronounced this 'Tchaynadawksa'. Good grief.