Life must be filled up

My goodness, my Trudy post yesterday was surprisingly popular.

The first thing I saw when I pulled up one of the kitchen blinds this morning was that my pink double hellebore has started flowering. No picture, because it’s hanging its head. At last, I’ve achieved my ambition of having hellebores and snowdrops flowering together in the same bed. The snowdrops there are ones I’d moved. Most of my snowdrops are on a bank and last year I transplanted a clump further along. Hurrah, they’ve taken and are flowering. My hope is one day to have colonies of them all the way along the bank. I grow on any hellebore seedlings I find and one is about to flower. I’m so keen to see what it’s like and decide whether it’s worth keeping, that I’ve put it right outside the kitchen door.

The bad? The second thing I saw was the remains of a large bird. When I went out, I found it was mostly feathers and in three parts, likely to blow around. Our instructions for dead creatures, like mice, are to double wrap them and put them out with ordinary rubbish. I was armed with two bags and, gingerly and shuddering the whole time, disposed of these remains as demanded. Ugh. It’s nice to see birds but not to handle them, especially when they’re dead.

It was absolutely freezing at the market this morning, but see what I bought.
I love the outward facing flower which means you don’t have to turn it up to see its loveliness. It's far too cold to go out and plant it now, so it's living in the porch for the moment.


( also )

Photo Ashwood catalogue

If you visit a garden centre and see Hellebores labelled ‘Ashwood Hybrids’, they’ve been bred at Ashwood Nurseries. Most of the best ones never get as far as the garden centres as they are snapped up as fast as they can be produced at the nursery itself. Yesterday I went to hear the owner, John Massey, give a talk to our local NCCPG/Plant Heritage group (aka The Plant Snobs). As happens every month, it was a beautiful afternoon and there were all we gardeners stuck indoors. Luckily, it was well worth the effort. Not only does John Massey know everything about Hellebores (and lots of other plants), he has met almost everyone in the horticultural world (Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd, for example) and has plenty of anecdotes about them.

While slides were shown of the beautiful plants he’s grown or photographed in the wild, there were ‘oohs’ and groans from the audience which were later described by our chairman in her vote of thanks as ‘orgasmic’. I think she was getting her own back for being referred to so frequently as ‘a dominant lady’ but I did mutter to my neighbour quite early on, ‘This is pornography!’ Beautiful and funny: what more could you ask of a lecture? And I want lots more Hellebores in my garden. I'm not keen on all the new doubles but those picotees...



John Massey manages a cheerful grin for my camera.

If you grow hellebores, you'll always find a little cluster of seedlings around them. I've had no success transplanting these, so I wait until they flower in situ, to see if they're any good. I've had my eye on a particular bud on a tiny plant and today it was open.



Better than most, I think.

So far this year, all the daffodils for the house have come from the garden. Yesterday at the market daffs were four bunches for a pound, so how could I resist?



More pictures here in the gallery.
Edit: duh, wrong gallery. It's right for March now.

Yesterday I went to my first NCCPG meeting in months. I felt guilty at letting them down by not being there to run the book stall but I just couldn't face going. At last I was resolved, it was nice to see the dear things and we had a good meeting.

Our speaker was Keith Wiley, who'd driven up from Devon with his wife, bringing a boxful of plants to sell. Keith is well known as the former head gardener at The Garden House, Buckland Monachorum. This was originally owned and designed by the late Lionel Fortescue and when Keith went there it was run as a traditional woodland and border garden. This was hard to manage with a staff of two and Keith introduced the naturalistic, self-balancing style for which he is now known. In a series of stunning slides he showed how the natural landscapes of Devon, California and South Africa had inspired him to reproduce the idea of this in the garden. For instance, an area designed as a 'South African' garden which had the style of the original but used plants from elsewhere. He has now left the Garden House (I think he fell out with the trustees) and is running a nursery while designing and building his own garden, free from all constraints. Well worth hearing.

Meanwhile in Dorset things are pretty waterlogged. I picked up some wood yesterday and that was about the limit of my gardening. The birds were making a terrible racket early in the morning and I'm sure I saw a deluded couple nest-building in a hedge. There was also a large bee zooming about. Down in town I have seen dwarf narcissi in flower already but here, apart from a couple of shrubs, the only flower out is the first hellebore,



a nice yellow one.

Quite spring-like here today. I may not summon up the energy to do any real gardening but here's a pretty thing.


Pink cyclamen growing with snowdrops, which also look good with hellebores.



It's a pity you can't see the maroon spots inside the hellebore flowers.

I read in the Telegraph's gardening section last Saturday that snowdrops 'struggle in clay'. The struggle obviously availeth here, as they do very well. This time of year galanthophiles go mad spotting different varieties of snowdrop. I like to see snowdrops en masse. I like them to be visible from the house so that I don't have to go out in the bitter cold, get on my knees in the mud and then, with frozen fingers, lift up each tiny head to see the captivating little stripes and spots that make one flower 'different' from another. Pick a few for a tiny vase and you can worship in comfort. They have a faint but sweet smell, too.