back in the garden

As the snow has melted some of the small bulbs have emerged amazingly unscathed.  The cyclamen along the front of the house look completely unruffled, their fleshy little pink flowers as cheerful as ever.  Who would ever have guessed that these Mediterranean flowers would shrug off being buried in snow so insouciantly?  Some dwarf iris that were in full bloom when the snow arrived have likewise emerged intact.  But any open flowers on the Japanese quince and the camellias have been ruined, and I am waiting to see if the remaining buds will open, or if the cold killed them too.  Likewise the tantalising fat buds on the Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Raffill'.  I was so close to seeing what it was finally going to do, and maybe now I'll have to wait another year.  Although you could say what was another year, when I had already waited fifteen?

I turfed the pots of hyacinths out of the greenhouse again, now that the fierce cold spell has passed, along with the pots of Solidago and rooted box cuttings that I hid in there when the Beast from the East was imminent.  Normal frosts should not hurt them, and the floor was so completely covered I couldn't get in there to do any watering.  The pots of violas came out as well.  They spent the winter under cover, after last year when I left them out of doors and lost more plants than I was expecting to, even though they were in a sheltered place and had been cut back in late summer to encourage them to make bushy overwintering clumps.  The worst of the winter should be over now, though, or at least we hope so, and they should be OK outside.

I returned to weeding and spreading home made compost on the long flower bed in the front garden.  The bits of it that didn't get weeded and topped up with Strulch last year had got rather spectacularly weedy, making it a fiddly job, but it was good to be outside.  The birds have suddenly started singing again, now that the cold has gone, making spring seem much nearer.

I should have been at the garden club's monthly meeting tonight, but in a final flourish the snow has put paid to that, as the nurseryman who should have given the talk is still snowed in somewhere in Wales.

Addendum  My loaf of bread that mysteriously failed to rise has had the ultimate vote of no confidence from the chickens, who declined to eat any more of it.