Over the FENCE Our magnolias are looking beautiful
It's so good to be back on the plot!
The garden is finally blooming! Photinia ‘Mandarino’ is particularly stunning with its bright red foliage. A good old stalwart in the garden is a forsythia with bright yellow flowers. It’s a really tough old shrub.
Having recently celebrated a milestone birthday, I was given a rose bush with pink blooms called ‘Rosa Sandra’ by my niece and nephew. I’ve planted it up in a pot so I can easily see it from the house. I also potted up a lovely hebe called ‘Magic Summer’; it has very pretty pink foliage which is a good contrast to all the green foliage around.
It was so good to get back onto the allotment again after all the storms. And now the ground has warmed up, I'll be able to plant up the potatoes.
During a visit to the garden centre, I bought a few seed packets. I couldn’t resist a packet of curled cress, which evoked childhood memories of egg and cress sandwiches, after having grown the cress on a sheet of blotting paper on a sunny windowsill.
Indoors I’ve sown carrot ‘Early Nantes’ in toilet roll middles; that method was a huge success last year, resulting in perfectly formed carrots. I also started off some butternut squash.
I mentioned last time that I was planning to visit the Camellia Festival at Chiswick House. I managed earlier in the year and wasn’t disappointed. The camellias date back to the 1800s and they’re all stunning, so it was quite impossible to choose a favourite!
Spring has arrived in the garden and some plants are flowering earlier than they usually do. Magnolias M. stellata, M. soulangeana and ‘Leonard Messel’ are beautiful
– I just hope we don’t get any severe frost to spoil the flowers. One of my favourite plants for new foliage in spring is sorbaria ‘Sem’ – the colour is so lovely. The only problem with this plant is that it likes to go walkabout in the garden but the suckers are easy to keep in check. Drimys lanceolata is smothered in flowers – I love this shrub, which was a present from my son a few years ago. The corylopsis and Osmanthus delavayi in the oval garden have also just started to flower.
In the front garden primroses are really coming into their own – the ‘Blue Zebra’ flowers are really striking – some are deep blue and others a paler shade.
Bare-roots of the ‘Pamina’ anemone and the cimicifuga have arrived and I’ve potted them up.
I’m working my way through the overwintered pots in the cold greenhouse and including the dahlias, which I left in their pots. I’m very careful with watering in this greenhouse and was so pleased when I tipped the dahlias out and found big, fat healthy looking tubers. I’ve potted them up into snugly-fitting pots to spur them into growth. I’ve also sorted out my pots of hymenocallis and polianthes bulbs and top-dressed or repotted as necessary. The hostas in pots have also been checked and top-dressed.
I’ve moved the allium and lily pots out of the greenhouse. I put the alliums on the patio and was dismayed to find one morning that they’d been got at by some creature – probably the squirrel who occasionally visits the garden.
We've quite a few big holes appearing in the garden – too big for a squirrel to make so
I'm wondering if a fox has been
busy. A house up the road has had badgers in their garden but the only way into ours would be to climb the fence. Do badgers climb over fences? I'll have to investigate.
I visited Little Brook Nursery and bought the fuchsia varieties I wanted. These include ‘Put's Folly’, ‘Checkerboard’, ‘Annabel’ and also a couple of whips to start new standards.
For my birthday, my sister gave me a beautiful pale pink camellia, which I'll plant in a corner of the front garden. We have two there already and they’re happy.