spring flowers

Something new seems to come out every day at this time of the year.  In the ditch bed the purplish-pink pom pom flowers of Rubus 'Olympic Double' are looking very sumptuous.  I got my plant by mail order years ago, from a serious specialist shrub nursery, then suddenly it was all over the weekly gardening press as a readers' special offer, which seemed to kill its prospects dead at the top end of the market.  My former employer never stocked it.  It is a cheerful thing, though.  A bit of a one trick pony since after the purple flowers nothing else of any note happens for the rest of the year, but a perfectly pleasant occupant for a largish woodland edge border.  It runs, but only enough to give an informal effect of mingling.  I like plants that mingle (up to a point, I'm beginning to wonder if the only safe use for Coronilla varia might be stabilising a motorway embankment) but if you were a tidy gardener who like everything to stay firmly in its place you might not warm to 'Olympic Double'.

Dicentra spectabilis is in its full glory.  This is the tall version of Dicentra, not one of the dainty ground covering ones, whose arching stems carry dangling pink and white flowers that look like a lady in the bath if you turn them upside down.  And use your imagination.  It will help if your sense of imagination is quite vivid.  Mine is, as I used to remind colleagues who told me that various possible investment outcomes were impossible on the grounds that I couldn't possibly think that.  I could, and it sometimes happened, like the costs of excavating the Eurotunnel over-running by more than the amount the contractors had provided for over-runs.  Lots more.  Nowadays we are supposed to call it Lamprocapnos spectabilis instead of Dicentra.  One of the ways I know I am middle aged, apart from needing varifocals and not having any idea what's in the top forty, is that my brain is becoming steadily more resistant to plant name changes.  I've learned Dicentra spectabilis.  And Stipa arundinacea, and Schizostylis coccinea.  Why not leave it at that?

I've got a white form of the Dicentra (or Lamprocapnos) as well, but it is not nearly so vigorous as the pink.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing so long as you know what to expect.

The scented, pure yellow deciduous Azalea luteus is just coming out.  I have managed not to put anything pink next to it, to my great relief.  I normally catch myself out that way every year, looking for a home for some small pink or yellow thing, and then finding I've shoehorned it in next to something else yellow or pink, and they clash.  A rather smart white cluster flowered rhododendron relative that I got from Glendoick is also just opening.  I have forgotten its name, and there won't be time to look it up for you now as I'm on the glide path to serving supper in ten minutes (attempting to cook rice, not my strong point.  Shortcrust pastry may hold few fears, but my rice comes out like glue half the time).  The white almost rhododendron is much happier than my other purchases, who found their new lodgings perched above a ditch in the semi drought of the Clacton coastal strip a very poor substitute for their Scottish home, let alone the Himalayas.

And that is all the flowers there's time for as I try to keep an eye on the rice.  If I remember tomorrow I will look up the name of the pink species peony that is an object of complete beauty for the three days or so that its flowers last.  You get extra points for growing those in your garden.

The short indignant tabby is sitting next to my chair so that I have to be very careful not to trample on her each time I go to the stove to check.  She is squawking for more food, and I have been telling her she already has food, but now I see (or rather I heard before I saw) that Our Ginger is finishing it for her.