Charming chionodoxa will remind us of our friend Adam

I stayed at my friend Veronica’s a couple of weeks ago for a very sad occasion, the funeral of Adam Greathead, a young gardener who was featured in Garden News in My Life in Plants just a short time ago. I was struck by the hugely therapeutic and restorative power that gardening has. My friend is in her 80s now and has just taken over an extra acre of ground on top of the four or five acres she has landscaped over the last 27 years. Already huge changes have taken place. Old, diseased trees taken out and the area landscaped with that most efficient of gardening tools – a mechanical digger. Long before the land was hers she had worked out just what she wanted to create and now that her dream has come true she has already planted more than a hundred ornamental trees with plans for many more. And she’s thinking about what she’ll grow underneath them.

On the kitchen table was a brown paper bag with ‘ Chionodoxa luciliae 100’ hand wri en across it. It was ge ing late to plant them but she’d just been given them by a generous friend, and the bulbs were in fine fe le. They won’t make much impression this coming spring – just a small patch of colour, but every year through self-seeding, that patch will grow and grow until it becomes a pool of blue. It will remind us all of Adam.

Very few of us will ever have the opportunity that Veronica has had, but all of us can look forward to plo ing what we’ll do next and thinking about how lucky we are to plan and partake in our own garden!