Hand-me-downs

I'd asked for some gardening tools for my birthday, being so bereft in this department that, in desperating to start digging the path beds when we first moved in, I had borrowed a garden fork from my boss.

My priorities were some topiary shears for keeping the shrubs in the back garden shaped in half the time it took me to go around with a pair of secateurs, a shovel (I had also become tired of picking up armfuls of swept arisings to carry to the green waste bin) and, if the budget stretched, a pruning saw (to take my pruning efforts to the next level!).

In the end I received generous amounts of money from my family which will more than fund my gardening shopping list, but Mum took me into the garage and offered me a selection of hand-me-down tools where she'd acquired duplicates or upgraded versions over the years.  Oddly enough, I feel more pleasure at being given these old friends from our garden than I am with the thought of an Amazon delivery.  Don't they look grand?

In the garden today

The primroses keep flowering... and the slugs keep nibbling them, and everywhere bulbs are shooting up.  Yet I've just hung up the Christmas wreath on our door.  A's Mum grew up in Kenya where the flowers kept flowering all year round.  She doesn't think that this premature burst of growing will do the plants any harm, as the lack of seasons over there didn't curb the displays.  Hope there's something left for Spring.

Runcible

We took a trip out to one of my favourite local National Trust gardens on Saturday - Charlcote Park.  The gardens aren't particularly extensive or notable, unlike nearby Hidcote, being mostly deer park, but the croquet lawn there has two long herbaceous border strips and I'd been hoping to plunder them for some inspiration for my own, much smaller, front path borders.

Unfortunately the borders were looking pretty sparse apart from some lovely dancing grasses, however on another deeper border near the cafe there was a much more unusual planting scheme...