HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

No point telling me it’s not spring yet. Not when those crocuses of hope are pushing up all over the place.

It feels like spring outside and it looks like it too. I went out to the wheelie bin and got rain and sunshine at the same time, which pretty much clinched the diagnosis.

The snowdrops have been. So too have aconites and iris reticulata.

Someone’s camellia is busy doing its thing, though its neighbour is less lush.

Looks like my cotoneaster is playing dead again, and one of hydrangeas has copped it. A couple of salvias were meant to disguise a missing chunk of the pot, but that didn’t quite work out.

On the plus side, I now know what slugs do all winter.

As a young child, I thought gardens were a place of wonder, and almost infinite in size. Snails fascinated me. So did the loofah plants that grew alongside the house in Alexandria. Snapdragons were called gueule de loup, made for opening and shutting like a wolf’s mouth. The gardener swept the path with a palm leaf, and watered when the weather was especially dry, though, as every Alexandrian will tell you, the weather is absolutely perfect in Alex.

As an adult, I’m a fairly lazy gardener and anyway the patio isn’t infinitely large. At the moment it’s not so much a riot of colour as someplace to go to between Zoom meetings. But you’ve got to stop and smell the roses, as they say.

The roses aren’t out yet, the honeysuckle is barely visible, and I’ve no idea who ‘they’ are, but even so I did that smelling thing today. And yes, I’ve now figured out what the neighbour’s cat has been doing all winter.

How is your garden doing this month? Is it bursting into life, or haven’t you got around to checking?

6 thoughts on “HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

  1. We’re a bit behind you down here in deepest Sussex – the crocuses are out and we still have swarms of snowdrops – daffodils are in bud but the squirrels have eaten most of the tulip bulbs, despite hoovering up the bird seed I put out. Not much pheasant shooting has been going on this year so what’s left by the squirrels is eaten by the dozen or so survivors that have taken up residence in our garden. When I come down in the morning there’s always one smartarse sitting on the bird table waiting for breakfast.

  2. Lots of snowdrops till, also crocuses – more thanI thought have survived the onslaught of the squirrels on the crocus and tulip bulbs I put in! Hellebores still going strong. I was amazed by your neighbours’ Camellia – ours are still onlyin bud (and back under their fleece for last night, as it was forecast as 0 but actually went to -2, so was glad we’d done that. Pulmenaria (a “migrant” from a neighbour’s garden!) in flower as well. Love the garden, and yes, run around it between Zoom etc, even take photos of it as things begin to flower or put out leaves!

    • That’s good to hear. Early spring flowers are even more welcome than usual this year, I think. Your photos will be a terrific reminder in months to come (and possibly also useful as a Zoom background?).

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s