26 April 2016

This is my first blog so here goes! I will be charting what I do in my personal garden and the flower field.  I might share my experiences from garden visits and my now small involvement with garden design.  I hope to give you lots of seasonal tips and there might be the odd rant occasionally as all gardeners and flower farmers, farmers moan about the weather! It is not an easy life growing all your own plants without pesticides or herbicides but that is what I choose to do and the rewards can be amazing.  I like to gloss over the bad times and failures, horticulture is full of them and I have become hardened to it in my 27 years of gardening extensively only occasionally becoming moved to tears if an animal

such as a Roe Deer has caused extensive damage overnight (only possible in my private garden as flower field like a prison!)

Upsets are often rewarded by pleasures but you can never have it all.  The weather is really, bitingly cold and the annuals and perennials are really holding back this spring.  My tunnel and glass house are bursting at the seams but planting out is slow.  Snow and sleet here today but the Ranunculus in the tunnel indicate warmer times.

Although summer things are slow to get going because of the cold spring, it is cheering that the spring bloomers, especially the ephemerals like Erythronium and Trillium last much longer in the garden.  I try my best to turn most negatives into positives these days so another positive is the fact that some winter and spring shrubs have excelled in length of flowering.

Noteworthy were my Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’ and Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’, due to the mild winter followed by cold, flowered for nearly 4 months each, when normally it would be two months.  I have the most enormous Osmanthus x burkwoodii, a tree really and I love to use it’s branches with my tulips, so delicately fragrant,  as it usually begins flowering in April and I get about 5 weeks of bloom.  I was concerned when it began blooming in February this year and used it with my Daffodils but it is still blooming and I can use it with my tulips, so there are always positives even with vagaries of weather!