Take time to enjoy colour at every turn

The garden is currently offering colour in all directions and it’s wonderful to take time out to enjoy it. Some birds are bypassing their nearby bath and taking a dip in a small, natural pond, treading over double, golden kingcup (Caltha Flore Pleno) flowers in the process. Thank goodness they’re tough, as are the associate mounds of mossy saxifrage. Bugle, lungwort and Ophiopogon complete the flower scene, but animated pond residents, diving beetle and newt prolong the interest.

Spring bulb displays continue, grape hyacinths, scilla and tulip having taken over from fading narcissi. Hyacinths, once forced for winter colour indoors, have naturalised in the shade of a silver birch and whinstone rock. Their blue, pink and white blooms have retained their original fragrance if not size. This is a favourite stop and appreciate spot.

Out in the borders there’s colour at every turn. Some large and striking, others best viewed at ground level, though no less attractive. A tall group of purple honesty calls across the lawn ‘visit me first’ but on the way we are stopped in our tracks by the slightly offbeat trillium whose leaves and petals are in threes. Then the herbaceous forget-menot emerges in the company of drumstick primulas and assorted anemones.

Other borders beckon and it’s down on one knee time. This is the best position to appreciate the yellowcentered pink flowers of primula ‘Guinevere’ and the fresh blooms of Epimedium ‘Sulphureum’ as they emerge from the ground.

Groups of cowslip surrounded by self-sown seedlings are almost the icing on the cake, but there are historic wallflowers in a drystone structure, and other beauties to inspect, before attention turns to the flowering fruit trees.