The back garden - March

Forsythia borrowed from next door, growing through the fence... a surprise blue flower that I haven't been able to identify... new shoots from the pruned roses promising a good show later in the year... Primula by the pond... ground cover spaghetti junction

Late March garden

Pathway border completely filled with plants...grape hyacinths everywhere, dirtying fingers with brown pollen when picked for a Mother's Day bouquet...primroses, becoming the bullies of the border...a beautiful yellow flower I remember from gardens in west London but what is it's name?...wonderful vivid flowers from the azalea...alien peonies coming up everywhere now...foxgloves doing a treat.

Round and about: Mid March

 

An assessment

This weekend was my first chance to properly assess the garden this year.  The lengthening days have meant that there have been tantalising twilight-lit glimpses of activity as I arrive home from work in the evening, but no real time to get out into the garden and take a good look.  Here's what I found:

My garden is looking overgrown!  This I knew, and for the most part is the result of a deliberate strategy to leave well alone last year due to a) not knowing what was in the garden or what to do with it; b) it being too late in the year and too close to frosts to prune back some of the identifiable overgrown shrubs; and c) wanting to leave plenty of ground cover for over-wintering wildlife.


This is definitely a spring garden - yay for Spring

The bulbs that started sprouting in August and have so far only produced massive carpets of leggy shoots have materialised into grape hyacinths - joy!


My garden is shady.  This meant protection from the worst of the frosts over Winter but now means that other, more open, gardens on the street are way advanced of mine in the flowering of bulbs.  I even have gradients of shade within the garden, with the shadiest parts those closest to the garden gate.  The primroses that are putting on an amazing display near the front door haven't even begun to bud near the gate.


It's nice to meet old friends again.  We've been here nine months now and it was only after I had stood puzzling to identify tree in bud half way along our boundary wall that I remembered the faded spikes of lilac blooms when we moved in.  And lilac is one of my favourite trees!

I have had some successes already.  The rambling rose under the window is already looking perkier after a prune and Winter under mulch and the japanese anemones are starting to get going too.

Turing's sunflowers

I came across this article the other day, the excellent MOSI have organised a mass sunflower experiment this year in honour of the centenary of Alan Turing's birth.  There's an email list you can join which will remind you to get into action closer to planting time.  I've never grown a sunflower before, and the thought of doing it for a higher scientific purpose really excites the geek in me, so I've signed up.

The story of Alan Turing's life and career is pretty amazing, and I found this site which gives a far better account than I could ever manage.

Early March garden

The promise of blossom on the cherry tree...pretty white bells on the azalea...peonies starting to poke their alien heads out of the ground...a surprise daffodil(narcissus? daffodil?)...pinpoints of intense pink and purple from the lungwort I took a gamble on last year and didn't weed out of the border

Helebores

By far the best helebores I have seen this year, and that even includes NT gardens, are A's mother's in Somerset.  They don't get any special treatment, they've just been in the same bed for years, admittedly a bed which is, at its highest, half a foot higher than the path beside it, from years of mulching with compost.

Weekend!

This is our first weekend at home since the beginning of January and the forecast is mild = a chance to get stuck into the garden that has been sprouting and changing in front of my eyes for weeks.  At last!  Hope your weekends are shaping up too.  I'll post what I managed to get up to over the coming weeks.

shears

We spent the weekend with my family, stripping out my brother's new house.  It's a red brick terrace, previously occupied by a now elderly lady who bought it and lived in it from new.  In the back yard is a lean-to shed, and inside we found a dusty but carefully laid out workshop, left as last used, with still-shiny nails carefully sorted into coffee jars, spare floorboards and off-cuts stored across the roof joists, old tobacco tins full of things that might come in useful one day and a Morris Minor hubcap. 

Further in, propped or hanging up on the wall, were a selection of careworn gardening tools including a lovely pair of shears, one handle threaded with a length of string for hanging up.  Rusted, they still opened and closed with a lovely movement to reveal silvery, nearly-sharp blades.  Although I received a very generous gift of hand-me-down gardening tools last December, hand shears were still on my wish list, particularly now that the shaped hedges in the back garden are beginning to sprout.  My brother kindly allowed me to take this pair home, now I'm just waiting for the frosts to finish.