Monday March 23rd
I did my first spot of gardening this year on surprisingly warm 12th and 13th March after the binmen had finally emptied my garden wheelie bin of the clematis I chopped down the day after the bin had been emptied for the final time last year, which was 23rd October.
There had been no room left in the bin to put the leaves and twiglets that fell off my two ash trees down the end of the garden, or the dead ivy leaves that were still falling from the trees, neither of which I wanted in my compost bin. Consequently I swept them into piles and left them at the bases of the trees in various locations around the garden, for creatures to live in. I don’t think that hedgehogs come in the garden any more, but my frogs needed somewhere warm to live, I supposed. I wasn’t wrong, because as soon as I started shoveling up the piles of twiggy debris out hopped a frog, so I left a small amount of leaves at the base of the ash trees.
For two and a half hours on Thursday 12th I hacked back the pink buddleia bush, to strengthen it, cleared all the old rotting leaves and cut back all the dead grasses from most of the plants in the back garden. This filled the bin again, so the hacking back in the front garden would have to wait until the bin was emptied again. On Friday I spent a further two and a half hours digging and titivating the earthy bits still near the house. I need to decide what to put in the shade of the fence which is now well over six feet high. The clematis montana in the corner which I cut right back when I had my new fence put up has only put out a couple of shoots, so a pink May looks to be out of the question this year in that area of the garden, and of course, I had the big clematis montana that covered the old dog run taken completely away when I had the roof put on the dog run. Nellie Mosa clematis has sent out some shoots, but she won’t get very high climbing up the trellis because anything on that trellis gets destroyed by the dog!
There were not many flowers to photograph, but my Myschka’s old basket was still looking beautiful with the Spring bulbs I had planted. I did the collage of them on 6th March.
Everyone has been saying how late everything is this year, so I thought I would have a look back at my photos I have taken over the past few years to compare. So here we go:-
2012 – 21-23 March
Forsythia is out (not yet in 2015), hyacinths are out (just out in 2015), muscari is out (no sign yet in 2015 – I can’t have got rid of them all, surely), ribes hasn’t yet flowered in 2012, but is just starting in 2015, violets are in flower, some are in 2015. Not sure where the big daffodils are in 2012, but they are in full flower in 2015, and the early ones are just finishing. Dwarf daffs are at the same stage. Dicentra is just showing colour in 2012, but has only just started sprouting.
2013 I didn’t take any photos until 21st April when the violets, pulmonaria, dwarf daffs, ribes, muscari were all out, so that was a month later than this year.
2014 I only took a couple of photos on 22 March which showed next door’s Forsythia in full bloom, polyanthus out (but they were new) as the yellow one is now, a dwarf daff at the same stage as now, Ribes not yet in flower and no sign of Dicentra or Muscari.
My conclusion is that although I thought the daffs were late coming, everything looks about the same. Maybe I was lulled into a false idea that Spring was actually here during the warm spell a couple of weeks ago! The next couple of weeks should see some changes, looking at the leaf buds that are sprouting, and the pear blossom is poised to come out, if the birds don’t have it first. Silly place to hang bird feeders, I suppose.
And this is my garden as at 23.03.2015
09/04/15 As it has been cold since I took the photos above, nothing much has changed, although leaves are now sprouting out and weeds have been springing up, which I weeded away today.
Blossoming 20/04/15
21st May 2015
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