I finished my first seed sowing this morning. The sunflowers which germinate rapidly and make big strong seedlings can wait until March, like it says on the packet, as can the half hardy annuals. I don't normally raise many of those, having nowhere to grow them, but schemes for a pot garden by the back door and a cutting bed in the veg patch could use some. If I get that far. Ideas that seem absolutely brilliant in February have a way of unravelling by May. As I went through the box of seed packets I remembered the other reason why I start sowing now, which is that there isn't room in the heated propagator to do everything at once.
The beds around the bottom lawn in the back garden are looking really good, as is the end of the wood, so much so that I persuaded the Systems Administrator to go and have a look at them after lunch. The snowdrops are hitting their peak season, and are standing in lovely fat, tall clumps. They must have liked the weather over the past year. The Daphne bholua are still in full bloom, and were humming with bees when the sun came out, and Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' is still going strong. This viburnum is fantastic value in the garden, because it has such a long flowering season, but don't try to grow on on light soil where it has to compete with an established hedge. I did, and 'Charles Lamont''s predecessor gradually died.
The punctuation of that last sentence looks iffy. 'Charles Lamont' needs to be in single apostrophes because varietal plant names should be, and I am a firm believer in the use of the possessive apostrophe. It is not difficult or confusing and people who say it should be abolished are simply wrong. But the two apostrophes together look odd. I must browse through Christopher Lloyd's writings when I have an evening to spare and see how he and his editors dealt with it. Maybe I should just have said its.
Near the daphnes the Edgeworthia chrysantha is starting to open its flowers. They are the most unlikely looking blooms, fleshy yellow and white funnels held in cone shaped clusters, with a marvellous scent. This is also the Mark II version, the first having been doing very nicely until the water table rose under it and it drowned. We tried to rescue it by digging a soakaway, but when a crowbar we were using to investigate the ground disappeared two feet into the soil under minimal pressure we realised that corner of the garden had turned to quicksand, and had to abandon the original Edgeworthia to its fate. Its successor has recovered from the cold winters, which nipped it back, and as well as being covered in exciting clusters of fat buds is suckering lavishly at the base. The stems are so flexible you can tie them in knots without breaking them should you want to, though I don't myself, and the bark can be used to make paper, but I'm not planning on doing that either.
The white flowered forsythia relative, Abeliophyllum distichum, is still doing precisely nothing. It is supposed to flower on last year's growth, when it flowers, to which end it benefits from a feeding and pruning regime to encourage it to make strong new shoots each year. I was obviously not generous or brutal enough, because mine didn't send up much in the way of fresh growth. What there was has got tiny, rather shrivelled, greyish brown bobbles on it, but I'm not convinced they are going to suddenly swell and open into starry white flowers. Maybe I am being too hasty in writing it off. It is one of those shrubs which look irresistible when seen flowering in a garden centre, carefully pumped and primed by the nursery grower, but I've seldom seen it ever looking so floriferous again in anybody's garden.
I let the chickens out for a run for the second half of the afternoon. They behaved very well, keeping together in a tight flock and staying in the front garden where I was working, so I could get on with things instead of spending a chilly and unproductive hour following them about or trying to be in two places at once as they split up. Little do they know, but behaving nicely when let out is their best guarantee of being let out again. Unless they do know? Chickens are brighter than you think, but I'm not sure they're that bright.
No comments:
Post a Comment