Wordless Wednesday - 22/05/2013 - Geranium Phaeum 'Lily Lovell'

Musing In May

May 

'Now children may 
Go out of doors,

Without their coats,

To candy stores.

The apple branches

And the pear

May float their blossoms through the air,

And Daddy may 

Get out his hoe

To plant tomatoes

In a row,

And afterwards,

May lazily

Look at some baseball

On TV.'

- John Updike 1932- 2009

The illustration is the from Cecily Mary Barker's 'A Flower Fairy Alphabet'.

Of course it could just as well be Mummy who is planting those tomatoes! 

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day - May 2013

A couple of blooms from my allotment this month. Firstly it's apple blossom time - the three small trees at the allotment 'Katy', 'Sunset' and 'James Grieve' are smothered with flowers. Sadly the weather has been cool, wet and windy since the flowers appeared but I'm hoping that the allotment bees have had the opportunity to pollinate. I did not realise until yesterday just how fragrant apple blossom is. I stood and sniffed for some considerable time.

Next the white currant which is dripping flowers this spring and which will hopefully provide some delicious berries this summer. I now have three currant bushes - red, white and black. The white currant is the most productive and the sweetest  ~ 

Thanks to Carol you can enjoy a treasure trove of May blooms over at May Dreams Gardens. I'm off to visit there later on this unseasonable cold and rainy day with pen and paper in hand.

Waiting Patiently In The Wings ...

Not much opportunity for gardening this weekend - the weather and other activities conspired to press the hold button. On Saturday I went to a Bee Festival - yes that's a bee festival and not a beer festival. The highlight of the event for me was the opportunity to listen to a talk by the inspirational Pam Warhurst from Incredible Edible. More of that in a future post. Yesterday offered a welcome and rare opportunity for me to meet up with my younger brother who lives abroad. So apart from opening and shutting the greenhouse and some potting up on Saturday night when hailstones held me captive in the greenhouse there's not much to report.

However it's been good to catch breath and think. I've been mulling over the new area that I hope to start planting up soon. This is at the base of the gabion walls and it swallowed up some of the 4 tons of top soil that was delivered recently. The border is north facing and rather shady although it will receive afternoon sun. I am hoping to plant some hellebores in there and to start to plant some of my special snowdrops in that area too. I will wait until the snowdrops concerned go dormant before lifting them from their present pots to plant in the ground. There should also be enough room for some pulmonarias, brunneras, corydalis and other spring flowering woodland plants. You can see some of the plants that are possible candidates in the above photo waiting patiently in  the wings for me to decise their fate.

Maybe one or two shrubs at the back to disguise some of the wall but still at that can't make my mind up as to which ones stage. Himself is keen for me to make a start on planting as soon as possible, before the local cat population think that this area of soil might have been specially provided for them. I can see his point but need just a little bit more time to think. Is there any new planting up going on in your garden this spring?

Wordless Wednesday - 8th May 2013 - Mathiasella bupleuroides 'Green Dream'

Greening The Gabion

It was last May when the gabion project got underway and now a year later one of the finishing touches has been achieved. The wall itself was completed some time ago - the above photo shows but a section. The gabion wall was built after the land it is sited on had been cleared and raised. Originally the area sloped down rather alarmingly towards a small stream and was uncultivated. Now we have a clearly defined boundary and have reclaimed some land. The wall is is bigger than I envisaged and has looked rather grey and bleak during the winter. We had decided though to plant up the top with something green. Eventually the decision was made to go for sedums but we have been waiting for spring to order the sedums and then plant them. Preparation for planting began last Wednesday, when 'trays' of chicken wire lined with weed membrane were constructed to sit on top of the walls. Early on Friday morning 4 tons of top soil arrived, followed later on by a delivery of a special planting mix together with 99 sedums. As with all the best laid plans of mice and men, I had arranged to meet a friend for lunch and then had food shopping to do, so had to leave him to toil on his own. The above photo shows what the wall was looking like when I left the house. This is what I came home to :

Special planting mixture and 99 sedums all in place! It will take a while for it all to knit together and form a carpet, which will hopefully cloak not only the top of the wall but which will also then start to tumble down over the edge. However just that little bit of green has made a huge difference. Discussion on the rest of the area goes on and has proved to be rather a contentious issue. Himself seeing it as a car parking space whilst I see it as a planting place. After all there is only one driver in the household and we do have a garage. The debate goes on but in the meantime I have gained some extra planting space at the base of part of the wall. This has involved removing some of our sad mossy excuse for a lawn but no tears here. 

In the evening himself sat down to a well deserved pint then he started to worry. "What if a bird takes a fancy to the sedum for nesting material and flies off with it in its beak?" he asked. I was not able to reassure him that there was no likelihood of this. Then the wind started to rise with a vengeance and as the night wore on he envisaged the sedums flying off into the stratosphere. My idea of hairpins to keep them in place was scorned so I suggested that perhaps he should mount an overnight vigil. Needless to say he did not and needless to say that when we did a sedum count come morning all 99 were present and correct.

Wordless Wednesday ~ 1st May 2013 ~ Take Three Days

End Of Month View ~ April 2013

I missed posting a March end of month view, because enthusiasm for both garden and allotment was at a low following the cold winter and other events going on at the time. Now that April is slowly ebbing away I am feeling decidedly more cheerful and energetic and am enjoying being in the garden, greenhouse and at the allotment again.

Reading through last April's end of month view post this April seems a long way removed in terms of both weather and flowers. No copious amounts of rain this year but it has definitely been on the cool side. Last April photos of geranium phaeum and tiarella in full flower illustrated my end of month post. When I looked yesterday evening the same geranium shows firmly shut pendulous flower heads whilst the tiarella looks quite bedraggled. Flowering now are the plants that I normally associate with March going into early April - pulmonarias, primroses, hellebores, little daffs, brunneras and other early spring gems. Later flowering hardy perennials such as astrantia and geraniums only seem to have broken through the ground in the last couple of weeks. I am only just in the process of dividing and potting some perennials for our garden club plant sale which is towards the end of May. Usually this is something that I do in March, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a warmer spell that they settle in and bulk up over the next month.

The greenhouse is slowly filling up with seedlings of tomatoes, sweet peppers, beetroot, lettuce and salad mixes, various basils, cucumbers, squashes, courgettes, red onions, leeks, purple flowering artichokes, broad beans and peas. I noticed last year that all my early French bean sowings did not fare well, so I've decided not to sow French beans until May. One exception though was a sowing of a new to me variety 'Speedy' which is recommended for early and late sowing. I will be interested to see how it fares. In the flower department I have sown nicotiana mutablis, nicotiana alata, brachycombe, cosmos 'Purity, various sweet peas, cerinthe, nasturtium 'Blue Pepe', gaura lindheimeri, ammi visnaga, orlaya grandiflora, daucus carrota 'Black Knight', cobaea scandens as well as some geraniums from my own saved seed. Time soon for pricking out and the inevitable greenhouse shuffle - again such activities would have normally started by now.

Progress at the allotment has been slow but I've been putting in some sessions especially over the last couple of weeks. I have planted the shallots that I started off in the greenhouse - 'Red Sun', 'Golden Gourmet' and 'Longor'. Potatoes will be going in during the coming week but just one bed this year. I've also been preparing a bed to plant some new strawberry plants after reluctantly deciding that the existing plants had probably reached the end of their most productive years. Sadly the winter seems to have taken its toll on the greenhouse at the allotment and on the lean to shed, so himself has promised some repair work. Oh and guess what I forgot to remove the nest in my shed which has already been blessed with three blackbird eggs. Makes journeys into the shed more problematic but I should be able to get in and out again more easily as the year progresses. At least now that we have a composting toilet on site I do not have to retire to the shed with my bucket. I'm not sure what the blackbird would have made of that.

As for new plants there have been one or two purchases, mainly at the Cheshire and Friends branch of the Hardy Plant Society plant sale as well as from a visit to my local nursery at Bluebell Cottage Gardens. I have yet more pulmonarias, a couple of brunneras as well abd a clematis recta 'Black Velvet'. For now they are taking time out in the coldframe.

Thanks to Helen of The Patient Gardener's Weblog, who came up with the excellent concept of the End Of Month view. Looking forward to reading what everyone else has been up to.

P.S. A beautiful warm and sunny afternoon to round off April - we enjoyed coffee sitting outside for the first time this year.

Wordy Wednesday - 24th April 2013 - 'This Telescoped Spring'

"There is a strange order in things this year ;  for here is the first swallow with us while half the daffodils are as yet only greenish yellow buds. As the seasons are early or late, so do we get various combinations of blossoming. Last year, with its especially early spring, brought the American flowering currant into bloom with the plum, and scattered the almond blossom upon shaking daffodils. Now, today, daffodils are coming out as the apple blossom still shows pink. The trees follow the calendar more steadily, except that the younger trees always seem to come into leaf much later than the full grown ones.

As the month draws on, there is a sudden rush of warmth and in a day or two the garden is a changed world, as in a fairy story where a spell has suddenly been lifted. Barely budding trees thicken with green, the spinach is rampant and, the rhubarb, that a few days back was pale and stubbly, is like an enormous tropical plant. The cherry blossoms that should have been in bloom for Easter, now burst into festoons of hanging blossoms. Yesterday the buds were still tight and colourless. Pear trees are heavy with flowering clumps. Sticky buds of the chestnut change and stretch out wooly and open with a few hours of heat and sun, showing their blossom as a hard point of pale green. Bees bumble, spiders run in the grass and ladybirds glow everywhere. As I stand, for luck, on the grass I hear the first cuckoo. After being held back for over a month, all the things tumble over themselves and each other in their urgent rush to bloom. Has there ever been such a rush? Frantically one tries to take it all in, but one misses many subtleties in this glut of blossoming. The primroses and daffodils that should have had place of honour a few weeks back now excite us somewhat less, because the lilac buds fatten so visibly, and anemones and violas flower. This telescoped spring wastes much beauty"

This extract from the chapter on April from 'Four Hedges', written and engraved by Clare Leighton could refer to April 2013 but in fact was written in the 1930s. The book chronicles the story of a year in of a much loved garden situated in the Chiltern Hills, tended to by Clare and her partner. Although I do not agree with the last sentence or two I think that the rest of her description of the late arrival of spring sums this one up perfectly. The above illustration is just one of the many exquisite wood engravings that illustrate the book.

That First Plant Sale Of The Year

Just before last weekend's social event of the year there was time for a lightening raid at that very first plant sale of year! This was held by the Cheshire and Friends group of The Hardy Plant Society as part of their 25th anniversary celebrations. I was member of this local group in the dim and distance past and still try to attend their annual plant sales when possible. There is always a good choice of happy and healthy plants on offer grown by both local nurseries and keen gardeners. We left home in brilliant sunshine but by the time we arrived the skies were clouding whilst a rather erratic wind blew up from nowhere. The sale was mainly based outdoors and quite high up on a hill top so the sellers deserved a medal for their tenacity.

Purchases included a trio of pulmonarias - 'Stillingfleet Meg', 'Majesté' and 'Opal' as well as the brunnera 'Langtrees' with its most subtly marked foliage. The other acquisition was cardamine quinquefolia which has hovered on the edge of my consciousness for years. This was the first time that I had ever seen it in the flesh but only a few seconds acquaintance were enough to persuade me that this plant was coming home with me. Sadly its flowers were almost on their last legs so it will be next spring before I can take photos and show them here.

I wish that I could have stayed long enough for a second sweep of the stalls as I'm sure that I missed out on some gems but was still delighted with my purchases. I'm sure that there will be other plant sales this year but there's nothing more exciting than the first of the year. What about you - have you had the chance to get to a plant sale yet this year and if so what did you come home with?