Suddenly, cyclamen flowers have appeared in front of the septic tank. They are Cyclamen hederifolium, the ivy leaved cyclamen, and come ahead of the leaves. Their emergence prompted me to tidy that part of the bed so that I could see them standing clean above bare earth, rather than among a litter of fallen twigs from the wild gean, and a mass of seedlings of the wretched wild geum that makes its home down the side of the wood. It is our native wood avens, Geum urbanum, and pictures of it on specialist wildflower sites make it look quite pretty. Indeed, its small, dingy yellow flowers are sweet if you like that sort of thing, but it seeds everywhere, all over the shady border and into the moss lawn. The seedlings look small and innocent initially, but grow into bulky plants with dull green foliage. They crowd the cyclamen and snowdrops and stick up out of the moss lawn, and I want no truck with them. The only way to get them out of the lawn is by hand weeding. Oh joy.
The cyclamen flowers were tottering slightly by the time I'd finished, as if not sure about being deprived about their supportive background of wood avens seedlings and juvenile herb robert. I'm hoping they'll stiffen up as they get used to the exposure. They are mostly white, with a few dark and one or two pale pink. The soil, originally orange brown, has turned much darker after years of diligently applying compost and leaf mould, and it sets the flowers off nicely.
The leaves, when they emerge, will be attractive, ivy shaped and variegated in green and silver. Cyclamen hederifolium makes vigorous plants, and the reason for not interplanting it with the later flowering C. coum is simply that the latter may be overwhelmed. On the whole I have segregated them in two different beds, though some flowers are coming up now in the birch bed that's theoretically the domain of the milder mannered C. coum. Maybe I should move the tubers over when they've finished flowering. The best way to buy cyclamen is as potted plants when they're in growth, rather than as dried tubers. There's a higher chance of their actually being alive, and you can choose your leaf pattern and flower colour. By dint of buying three or plants annually for years I now have a reasonable display, though it is still nowhere near the masses of flowers you see naturalised at stately homes where they've been growing for the past century.
Once I was working in that corner I didn't confine my attention to the weeds. Branches of the winter flowering honeysuckle had started to obscure the view of the Buddha statue, and I trimmed them to give a better view to the back of the bed and the wood beyond. The top of the Buddha's plinth is covered in a green carpet of moss, put there by the hand of nature, and you would never guess that the plinth was originally a tall OKA planter, bought cheap in a sale and turned upside down.
An evergreen berberis that was hanging out into the narrow access path through the shady bed behind the Zelkova got a trim as well. It is Berberis candidula, planted eighteen years ago and still going strong after one very heavy prune when it had got to a size and bulk that it took up too much of the bed and blocked the little path entirely. It has come back splendidly from the hard chop, but took its time. It is an evergreen, with neat, glossy, dark green leaves with white undersides, and flowers in a clean shade of yellow. It grows nowadays in a fair amount of shade, whereas when it was planted back in 1997 the site was much sunnier. I would not say that berberis was the most exciting plant for a woodland garden, on the other hand I like them. Totting up I can think of at least three other evergreen berberis around the place, all variants on the theme of dark green leaves and yellow flowers, which suggests I have a thing about them, or an unresolved berberis issue. I don't grow the popular B. darwinii or the rarified B. valdiviana. The former is a stalwart of the limited shrub offering found in DIY stores, while the latter gets you brownie points as a discerning gardener, but the flowers of both have got too much orange in them for my taste.
Tomorrow I shall take a couple of low hanging branches off the river birch, if it isn't raining.
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