The plant centre is closed today and tomorrow, so this morning I got my wish and was out in the garden. I'd be there now, except that it has just started to rain, moderately hard. A colleague said yesterday that on Christmas day he'd counted twenty different flowers out in his garden. I don't go in for counts per se. They raise the question of how open a flower has to be to count as 'out', and how far over it can go and still be included in the tally, and the odd battered rose doesn't contribute anything to the garden scene, even if it is technically 'out'. However, before settling down to the fingertip weeding and mushroom compost spreading, I did wander around the garden looking at what was making a good display at the moment.
One of the main things I noticed on getting up when I opened the bathroom blind, and again as I walked around, was not the plants but the birds. Tits and blackbirds flew in all directions, with an air of urgency as if they had business to attend to, and there was quite a respectable chorus just after dawn. Once I started weeding the robins appeared. Music and movement. Birds add greatly to the garden scene, as well as being useful natural aphid controllers. We are lucky here, to be next to woodland and in old landscape with numerous hedges and among farms that leave generous headlands and wildlife strips (all paid for by stewardship schemes, no doubt). Customers at work who ask about insects on their roses are sometimes surprised when I ask about the bird life in their garden, and steer them to the bird food as much as the insecticides. Some may suspect I am some sort of eco crank, or maybe even taking the piss, but they don't really need chemical spray, they need blue tits.
It has been a wonderful winter for berries (it was a bumper year for acorns, too, but the sweet chestnut harvest was pitiful). Plenty of hips, berries and crab apples set, and the birds have been slow to strip the bushes. I presume that is down to the mild winter. In the front garden, Malus 'Red Sentinel' is still laden with little bright red apples, the crop so heavy that the branches are weeping under the weight. 'Comtessa de Paris' has a nice display of little yellow apples as well, though I see that a few are doing that irritiating thing of remaining on the branches after turning brown, instead of dropping. The ever-popular 'Hornet' that grew at Writtle was a horror for doing that, and I made a mental note not to grow it.
Ilex aquifolium 'Golden Milkboy' has got one of its best displays of berries ever. This is an intensely prickly variegated form splashed with yellow in the centre of each leaf. It is quite prone to reversion, and painfully slow growing, admittedly on starved sand in the front garden. I keep it clipped to try and make a nice, dense dome like those in the photos of the late Rosemary Verey's garden, but I think it needs feeding up. The yellow berried shrubby ivy has a reasonable show, and in the back garden Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus' is still a smother of yellow fruit. A crop like that has never lasted into the new year before (I hope that doesn't mean it's on its last legs and is trying to set seed before pegging it). There's a nice crop of red berries on a slender leafed Aucuba too. That may have appreciated my removing great chunks of a vigorous shrubby honeysuckle that had engulfed it. The sea buckthorn still has plenty of orange-yellow berries. They are never the birds' first choice.
Prunus subhirtella 'Autumnalis' is flowering, both the new one in the front garden, and the old one in the back scheduled for removal because it sits too wet and branches keep dying. I feel as though the condemned tree is trying to reproach me, or spoof me into giving it a stay of execution, but when the leaves open I'm sure there'll still be too many dead twigs in there. The Daphne bholua are almost out, the first few flowers on 'Jacqueline Postill' yielding their spicy scent. Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' is studded with pale pink flowers, and has been for a while. The winter iris are beginning to get into their stride.
More surprising, and showing the effect of the mild weather, a plain green leafed, pink and mauve flowered Pulmonaria is well out. There are a few scattered primroses, and some cyclamen, though not sheets of them. One oriental hellebore has started blooming, a pale greenish yellow form with plum spots on the petals, and a couple of stinking hellebore, Helleborus foetidus, are well under way producing their little yellowish flowers. I collected these as self sown seedlings from the bottom part of the garden and tucked them in among the shrub roses, where they seem happy in the dark rootiness, and I hope that they will spread.
Mahonia japonica is opening but not in full flood yet in the back garden, and in the front M. x media 'Winter Sun' is still flowering, and has been for an incredibly long time. Sarcocca confusa is well out, though the scent wasn't carrying as well as it did yesterday at work (or maybe I couldn't smell it because I am going down with a cold). I noticed in passing that the leaves looked a bit pale and yellow. I will give it a dose of Maxicrop with seaweed, which is a great tonic for most things. The Hamamelis are not quite there. Two flowers were just about 'out', if I'd been trying to boost my total, but the real garden display hasn't started yet. Camellia japonica 'Alba Simplex' is still producing its incredibly elegant white flowers, a few at a time, and C. japonica 'Flame' is starting to join in.
The perennial wallflower 'Bowles Mauve' still had some flowers on it, but they were doing nothing for the garden, and the time really had come to tidy the plant, so I cut them off. They just looked left over and tatty. A self sown Euphorbia characias in the gravel is ahead of itself, its small lime green flowers just opening. They were badly scorched by the last two winters, and are enjoying the mild one. The leaves on the new basal shoots of my Euphorbia x pasteurii 'John Phillips' have visibly expanded in recent weeks, and the whole plant has developed a lush, confident air. It will get a nasty shock, if things turn cold this month or next. Leaves are an under-rated part of the winter garden. Our various pines in the front garden are looking very handsome, Pinus sylvestris 'Aurea' turning a nice shade of dark yellow that is not at all sickly or ill-looking, and the leaves of the Cistus look very neat and trim. They are good winter plants, when it doesn't kill them.
The first snowdrop leaves are through, and you can sense plants stirring and the garden getting ready to burst into life. This is simultaneously heartening, and alarming, because there not now many weeks left in which to weed, mulch and get the ground tidy before everything's on the move.
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