Life must be filled up

You can’t glance at a newspaper or switch on the radio at the moment without some cheery soul telling you that spring is here and All’s right with the world! I don’t know about the cruellest month but April should certainly be one of the busiest months of the year in the garden. If only. As storm follows storm, it’s either pouring with rain or blowing a gale. The bottom of my drive had been flooded for ages, there is standing water in parts of the garden and water is still running down the road. Apparently, this is the wettest it’s been since 1836.

I’m under strict instructions not to do more than fifteen minutes’ work in the garden at a time, which is nothing, so I’ve had to develop a new strategy of ‘little and often’. Often is the problem, see weather. The other day I did a few small jobs then saw some annoying grass in the border at the front of the house. As I forked up the clumps, I found that the soil there was actually liquid, about the consistency of a Christmas pudding mix. I’ve never seen anything like it. I feel sorry for owners of garden centres and nurseries because who is going to buy plants they can’t get in the ground? Watch out for bargains later.

The great joys of spring in my garden are the daffodils (nearly over) and the primroses (my favourite flower) which grow like weeds absolutely everywhere. I especially love them at dusk, when they seem to glow.

This is a new idea, which I’ll see if I can keep up. It’s easy now, but what about later in the year when there will be lots of flowers to choose from?

The garden currently has plenty of snowdrops, primroses and pulmonarias in flower but my pick is this hellebore, for its triumph over its surroundings. It’s an absolutely bog standard hellebore such as you might find anywhere, unlike these. There were two or three plants in the garden when I moved here. They are either on the bank, and therefore covered by giant ferns for most of the year, or nestling up against the trunk of a giant berberis. I do nothing at all for them except to cut off all the leaves very early in the year; this helps prevent a horrible disease they can get which turns all the leaves black. Every year they flower again. Wanting more hellebores, I bought a lovely white one, planted it in my shady bed, stood back and admired. The next year it had completely vanished. A mystery to me as I’d never known such a thing happen before. It just makes me more appreciative of these old, semi-wild trusties.
( primroses )

It’s still dark all day long but yesterday I whizzed up to the garden centre. I wanted to pick up my January card offer: 50 litres of compost at half price. Goodness, it was heavy to get in and out of the car! Lucky I have so much experience in how to tip these things about without actually picking them up. The offers for regular customers are of course intended to lure you to buy something else as well; a very successful ploy as I couldn’t resist pots of hyacinths on BOGOF. There were other pretty sights, like these primroses.



I didn’t look at the price tags, for fear of fainting from shock. Luckily my garden is already full of primroses, waiting for spring. One of these containers would make a nice present for someone, wouldn’t it?