WANDER DARKLY
Cert 15 ★★ On digital from tomorrow
IF you are especially sensitive about spoilers, look away now. In this wildly ambitious drama, Sienna Miller’s character, new mum Adrienne, dies in a car crash in the opening 10 minutes. Then Adrienne leaves her own body and witnesses her boyfriend Matteo (Diego Luna) speaking at her funeral.
The next minute, she’s alive again, with Matteo telling her she’s concussed. Adrienne isn’t convinced and, as they relive key events from their relationship, neither are we.
This is another excellent performance from Miller but the characters are nowhere near as intriguing as the premise. After a while, trying to decipher the various levels of reality becomes exhausting.
The seeds of most outdoor spring-sown crops won’t germinate until the soil has warmed up to 7C, so be patient or start them off indoors.
Start chitting potatoes.
Have you pruned your shrub roses? It’s time to cut them back and cut out old or diseased stems.
You can help your soil heat up in the veg patch by using cloches. This can be as simple as a plastic bottle cut in half.
Early March is the time to prune summer and autumn flowering clematis.
Lift and divide hostas before they come into leaf.
Summer flowering shrubs, such as fuchsia, spiraea, perovskia, lavatera, buddleja, and deciduous ceanothus, like ‘Gloire de Versailles’, usually flower on new growth, so a good chop now will stimulate plenty of this.
Mulch shrub beds with well-rotted manure or compost organic matter to retain moisture and reduce weeds.
Lift and divide summer flowering perennials such as rudbeckia, hemerocallis, aster and heleniums.
■■Panicking because the restaurants are shut and Mum’s expecting to be spoilt next Sunday? Cook’s Entertaining
Meal Boxes (from £8.36 per head; cookfood.net) contain mains, sides and pud – all made by hand, so they’re healthy, low-salt and look and taste like homemade, only better. Hide the boxes and no one will know.
■■Loneliness has been a major issue throughout the pandemic, but boosting your mood can be as simple as turning on the radio, with half of all people in one study saying it made them feel more connected to the world. The Little Shelford DAB Portable Radio (£35.95; Amazon) is stylish and simple to use.
■■Want to send your ma something other than the usual bunch of blooms this Mothering Sunday? Don’t Buy Her Flowers is a brilliant website that lets you either customise a gorgeous box of pressies or does the hard work for you – the Unwind Collection (£45; dontbuyherflowers.com) will leave her feeling very zen.
■■We’ve yet to meet a mum who wouldn’t want a better night’s sleep, so this Mother’s Day, why not treat yours to one of Drowsy’s Mulberry Silk
Eye Masks (£49.50; drowsysleepco.com). Unlike most eye masks, the wide Velcro straps make it easily adjustable and there’s no uncomfortable elastic.