Cold snap brings an early splash of colour
AFEW days ago I came across my next door neighbour blowing leaves from his lawn into our garden.
“It’s for your snowdrops,” he told me. “I’m giving them a covering of leaves so they have a bit of protection and a few extra nutrients.”
A nice blanket of beech leaves is just the thing to give snowdrops a good start, protecting them from frosts and breaking down slowly to improve the soil.
I grow our native Galanthus nivalis, and this spring I dug up and divided every clump, replanting the bulbs in fresh positions where I’m hoping they will spread out into a carpet beneath the trees.
Snowdrop season is still some way off and there are no signs yet of any leaves appearing through the ground, but other winter plants are behaving oddly.
This week I found some of my Hellebores – a full three months early. I came across them while digging out some wild strawberries that have run riot across a large part of the garden.
Now every time I mention weeding out wild strawberries, I get letters from readers chastising me for getting rid of these charming little plants.
Before I moved to my present garden I would have shared their concern, but here these tenacious colonisers grow so vigorously they choke the life out of everything else, so I have to thin them out or the garden would quickly revert to being one huge strawberry patch.
The flowering Hellebores puzzled me so I mentioned their premature appearance to garden designer Lynn Hill while chatting about the plans for her show garden at next year’s Gardening Scotland.
She said recent cold temperatures, which have included a couple of sharp frosts, may have triggered their early appearance.
“You can fool Crocus and Hyacinth bulbs into flowering early by popping them in the freezer for a couple of weeks and this could be the same mechanism that has caused your Hellebores to start budding,” she suggested.
Whatever the reason, I’m delighted to have something gorgeous to look at while everything else is going over and it has made me more determined than ever to create a winter border, filled with scent, flowers and berries, to cheer me up during the dark months.
The space I’ve earmarked lies beneath a lovely silver birch and a couple of mature pines, so digging out planting holes will involve hacking my way through lots of roots, but once the shrubs are in place I plan to surround them with bulbs that will extend the season into spring.
Meanwhile, this week I’ve also been hanging out bird feeders, where they can be easily seen from indoors and I’ve been delighted to welcome back the pheasants that hop over the road from the neighbouring estate to escape the guns.