The garden in April
Kari-Astri Davies is hoping for kind weather, fascinated by ferns and rearranging her plants
ON THE SECOND day of April, three swallows swooped low over the garden before disappearing off elsewhere, in what was the first sighting of the year. Exotically scented golden freesias have replaced the cooler, earthier fragrance of hyacinths in the small greenhouse, evoking thoughts of warmer climes and times.
April can be a cruel month hereabouts. For the last few years, not only has it been dry, with the April showers of poem and song often failing to materialise, but we have also had unseasonably warm spells, interspersed with late, capricious frosts. The warm weather brings plants on too early, especially many of the woodlanders. Much as I enjoy this early spring surge, I become anxious and cover particularly vulnerable new growth, although sometimes a layer of fleece or a plastic bottle cloche does not provide quite enough protection.
Last April, for the first time, a wisteria on the pergola produced hundreds of buds, reminiscent of chubby waggling lambs’ tails. I had anticipated quite a show, but a hard frost left many hanging limply, never to open. All was not lost, however, as enough did survive to cover the pergola in blossom. It delivered a surprise, too: what I had long thought was Wisteria sinensis var. sinensis f. alba, was in fact a looser racemed, bicoloured Japanese wisteria.
In the wood bed, Kirengeshoma palmata, a late-flowering, tallish plant, took a number of frosts, which blackened the young shoots badly. I left it alone; no cutting back. It looked unsightly for a long while, but resprouted and produced its tight-belled, yellow flowers at the end of the season, with little sign of the earlier damage. It would be a welcome respite if we did not have any sneaky late frosts this April and just a little bit more rain.
My fernmania
I recently counted 30 different species of ferns and their variants growing around the garden. I did not set out to collect them, and, if asked, I could not name them all: my identification skills are rudimentary at best.
I seem to have accumulated ferns because they are useful fillers and background plants for the shadier areas I have in the garden. Unfurling and unrolling fresh fronds in many different ways, spring is their time to garner attention, before mostly receding quietly into the foliar background.
I have used Dryopteris affinis ‘Polydactyla Dadds’, a form of native, scaly male fern, as an underplanting in a new shrub bed. This semi-evergreen fern has little rounded crests on the end of each pinna, which is the main leaflet coming from the rachis, or stem. John Dadds was apparently a well-known Victorian fern collector and nurseryman from Ilfracombe, in an area in Devon, including nearby Lynmouth, which became famous in the 19th century for
“Again rejoicing Nature sees Her robe assume its vernal hues”
Robert Burns, ÔComposed in Spring’
the wealth of variant ferns to be found in the damp, steep-sided coombes.
Fern collecting, or pteridomania, as it became known, was seen as the preserve of intelligent and refined people. Even women were allowed to participate in unaccompanied collecting excursions.
I am going to try growing ferns from spores this year. I will start looking at the sori, which are the dots on the backs of the fronds that contain the spores, in early summer, rather than late autumn as I did last year. Although the sori looked good then, on closer inspection, the little sori caps had lifted and the spores long gone.
On the move
I have been putting off moving and dividing some large clumps of plants in the main border, but if this job is left much longer, the plants will not perform so well this year.
Digging up and grappling with a hefty clump of the later-flowering rudbeckia ‘Henry Eilers’ is quite a physical task. Being taller, he needs to swap places with shasta daisy ‘Droitwich Beauty’. And much as I enjoy the old knotted clump of pale blue Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clark’, she flops around badly. She will be relocated in the garden and replaced with the longer-flowering Geranium wallichianum ‘Buxton’s Variety’.
“the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth, And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree The drowsy cuckoo and the humble-bee” Thomas Carew, ‘The Spring’