The garden in March

Kari-Astri Davies is ready to welcome sunny colour and making preparations for the growing season

WEEDING IN THE copse on a sunny, still day, I became aware of the background hum of hundreds of bees working among the wild, white plum blossom way above my head. A few days later, the now-pollinated blossom began losing a myriad of petals: the hum had moved on.

Cheery yellows

I was reading about a garden designer who had been briefed by one of their clients not to use yellow in any of the planting schemes. How sad, I thought.

Along our boundary stream, mounds of marsh marigold, Caltha palustris, are in full flower. Like hugely oversized buttercups, the golden flowers and burnished leaves call out for attention on a bright spring day. Low-growing yellow celandines twinkle alongside their larger cousins.

Yellow is the colour of spring, lifts early summer borders and bows us out with a daisy-led finale in early autumn. Beneficial hoverflies are fans of yellow; so are beetles. In summer, my bright yellow T-shirt often attracts a following cloud of tiny, black pollen beetles.

Floral tones range from sophisticated pale lemons, such as shrubby, pea-flowered Coronilla valentina ‘Lauren Stevenson’, through the bold yellow of tulips, such as ‘West Point’, acid yellows of euphorbia and soft yellows of lupins and hollyhocks, to the sunny golds of rudbeckia.

Daffodils are a quintessential March flower, although not all are purely yellow in my garden. On the gold spectrum, the ever-so-willing small, trumpet-flowered ‘Tête-à-tête’ is currently clashing with low-growing evergreen grass Uncinia rubra. This grass came from three different sources; seed-grown plants are the reddest-bladed and unfortunately do not agree with the yellow at all. To avoid similar colour clashes, narcissus ‘February Gold’, which, despite the name, flowers more often in early March, was planted in pots last autumn for subsequent relocation to appropriate harmonious quarters in the garden.

Compost and self-seeders

I am a lazy composter. The contents of three compost bins made from wooden pallets are disgorged and turned in late March. If knots of writhing brandling worms are still working, I know it is not ready. How these worms turn up in our compost heaps is one of those gardening mysteries. They do not live in ordinary garden soil, preferring decaying vegetation and manure.

Most garden material, apart from pernicious-rooted weeds and diseased plants, is composted. This means seeds in the compost. I used the last knockings of one bin in a summer pot: Maltese cross, Lychnis chalcedonica, germinated like mustard and cress, but nowhere else. In the veg patch, a bonus Agastache rugosa f. albiflora grew enthusiastically

“Sweetly breathing , vernal air, That with kind warmth doth repair Winter’s ruins” Thomas Carew, ‘Sweetly Breathing, Vernal Air’

among the carrots. This is a perennial which I cannot keep going in the main border.

As I continue to work through the beds, weeding and mulching, some self-seeders are relocated. Digitalis purpurea f. albiflora can be elusive: it will pop up randomly, produce lusty, felty-leaved flowering rosettes, then leave no seedlings behind. It refuses to self-seed in the copse where I would like it, but is happy in the grass garden, where I have had to severely curb its wanton progeny.

Jobs for March

The growing year is getting into its stride. Soon, I will be busy pricking out seedlings and potting on last year’s cuttings.

I am now starting off the dahlias I lifted and stored in autumn, including singles, almost black, lightly chocolate-scented ‘Mexican Star’ and lilac-suffused, white ‘Ethereal’. The tubers are potted up and put in the frost-free conservatory until late May, giving them a head start on those left to fend for themselves in the ground. Cuttings will be taken when they start to sprout. A shoot of approximately 4in (10cm) long is chosen, cut with a sharp knife to take a fine slither of the tuber if possible. Lower leaves are removed, the cutting popped into compost and kept warm. Tubers can also be divided, but they must be attached to an ‘eye’ on a piece of the old stem. Detached eyeless tubers will not grow.

“The effect of yellow upon the mind is of a bright, gay, gladdening nature, owing to its likeness to light” W J & G A Audsley, Taste versus Fashionable Colours: A Manual for Ladies on Colour in Dress, 1863

Left to right: A bee alights on a plum flower; delicate lemon Coronilla valentina; topping up the compost with dried leaves; yellow planting combinations add splashes of colour; russet Uncinia rubra.

Kari-Astri Davies started gardening in her twenties with pots of roses, geraniums and sweet peas on a parapet five storeys up in central London. She’s now on her fifth garden, this time in the Wiltshire countryside. Inspiration includes her plant-mad parents, as well as Dan Pearson, Beth Chatto, Keith Wiley and the Rix & Phillips plant books. Kari describes her approach as impulsive, meaning not everything is done by the book.

Left to right: Kari’s Jack Russell relaxes next to a vase of vermilion Maltese cross, Lychnis chalcedonica; potting up dahlia tubers to give them a helping hand in the growing stakes.