the fleeting joy of cherries, and the beekeeping season gets underway

The wild gean is out in all its glory.  The leaves are just starting to open, which gives the tree a slight tinge of bronze-pink, though the individual flowers are certainly white.  It is very lovely.

At the opposite end of the top lawn the Japanese cherry 'Taihaku' has just opened.  I have been looking at it periodically all through the day, knowing that its season is short, and that I'll be at work for the next three days.  The flowers are white, single, and large, and carried so generously that the tree appears a mass of white, again tinged pink by the newly emerging leaves.  The branches spread widely, and I hope that eventually it will reach right across the lawn.  After I planted it I put a bench by it, so that we could sit under it and look up at the blossom.  For the first couple of years the bench was bigger than the crown of the tree, but nowadays you can indeed sit under the canopy of flowers.  The story goes that 'Taihaku' was believed lost to cultivation in Japan, when in 1926 the great gardener Collingwood Ingram, an expert on cherries, nicknamed Cherry Ingram by his friends, recognised a rather tatty plant in a Sussex garden as the lost Great White Cherry, propagated it, and saved it for the world. Our plant is a descendent of that Sussex tree.  My late father-in-law planted a 'Taihaku' in the 1960s, when it was not so easily come by as it is now, so my partner has a sentimental attachment to our tree.

On a different subject entirely, I inspected the bees today.  I knew that all three colonies were alive because I'd had the roofs off, though not lifted the crown boards before today, to feed them when winter seemed to be dragging on for so long and I was worried they might starve.  March is an easy time to lose bees through starvation.  They were overwintered on mesh floors (for the benefit of non-beekeepers, the floor as you would expect is the bottom of the beehive, and was traditionally solid, made of wood.  In recent years beekeepers have been experimenting with floors made out of fine wire mesh, the idea being that any of the dreaded varroa mites that fall off the bees drop right through the bottom of the beehive before they can climb back on another bee).  I'd asked around other beekeepers about the merits of keeping the mesh right through the winter, and opinion seemed divided whether it would be too cold for them versus a solid floor that kept the icy winds out, or whether the additional ventilation would be a help to them by preventing condensation and damp conditions in the hive.  Apart from the period when I was using a vapour based varroa treatment I've had them on mesh, and they all survived the experience despite it being a very long, cold winter.

One of the colonies was a swarm that we didn't get until last July, and it was nip and tuck whether it was big enough to be worth over-wintering or whether to combine it with the colony I split from the big colony last spring.  I decided to chance it, partly because I was feeling lucky, partly because I had the spare hive and the swarm and the experiment didn't really cost anything, and partly because I liked the look of my existing stock and didn't want to mess them around.  So it was a bit of a result that the swarm made it through to this April.

My two original colonies were looking fine.  The big colony was beginning to fill the brood box and I gave them a super, given it is now good weather, there's  a nectar flow on from the garden flowers, and it's forecast to be fine for the next several days.  The colony I made from them were looking good too, though smaller.  Again for the benefit of non-beekeepers, what I wanted to know, apart from whether they had enough to eat, was whether the queen was laying eggs and the workers were busy making new bees, as they should be at this time of the year, and whether they'd started thinking about swarming yet, given it's now the second week of April.  In the back of my mind was the possibility of bee disease, but that wasn't the main aim of today's inspection.  Looking after bees is like looking after cats, in that you don't deliberately check your cat for illness and injury each time you stroke it, but part of your mind is registering whether its coat looks right and whether it has any tender spots that might indicate a new septic bite developing.

I left the swarm until last, because they'd been a bit lively when I was feeding them, and if they were going to get buzzy I didn't want them fussing round me while I looked at the other two hives.  They appeared to have gone queenless, as there were no eggs or brood.  That would explain the recent slight stroppiness.  I wondered whether to give them a week to see if they sorted themselves out, but decided to do what the books would advise, and gave them a frame with fresh eggs and brood on it out of the large colony.  I was very careful about shaking the bees off the frame before transferring it, as I would hate to transfer the queen by mistake and knacker the good colony in my efforts to remedy the bad.  In theory they should be able to make themselves a queen using one of the fresh eggs.  If they don't then they can have a queen cell (developing queen) once the big colony starts trying to swarm, as I expect it will.  I hear about non-swarmy strains of bees, but so far none have come my way.

more April flowers

The buds on the wild gean are just opening.  This is a big, multi-stem tree that sits at the point where the garden meets the wood.  It was here when we moved in, and I'm pretty sure it was put there by the birds and not our predecessors, who were not keen gardeners.  Prunus avium can be a weed tree in woodland gardens, and I recall being shown around such a one in Suffolk by an owner who regarded wild cherries with the lack of enthusiasm generally reserved for sycamore seedlings.  But it is a fine thing in the right place.  When in full bloom its beauty will indeed "shine out like a beacon of snow" for a few days.  The pigeons have a go at the flowers but it is too large to be unduly troubled by them.  Lucky we don't have bullfinches.

Little bulbs are still putting on a fine display.  In the gravel, following on from the dwarf iris, there are brilliant blue Scilla siberica, and softer blue Chionodoxa and Puschkinia.  Two-tone Muscari latifolium grows there, its flowers brighter blue at the top of the stem and dark blue on the lower half.  The white flowered Muscari botryoides album also does well and spreads obligingly.  I have a few plants of Anemone pavonina, bought at the Chatto gardens after admiring them in the gravel garden.  These come in rich but soft shades of pink and cream, with flowers of a similar size to A. coronaria.  They seem reasonably perennial, but my attempt to increase my stock by saving and sowing seed failed, as the seed went mouldy.  Maybe they will do the job for me in situ.

In the long bed along the edge of the drive I have a lot of hyacinths.  I have never bought a hyacinth on purpose to plant in the garden, but after using them in pots, even indoors, I always plant them out.  They last for years.  This is not unusual: Christopher Lloyd wrote of one clump in his garden that he knew was decades old, because the plants had originally been given to his brother when he had appendicitis.  I like to ring the changes in pots from one year to the next, so we have dark and pale blue, yellow, white, and an exciting shade of purple from the variety 'Woodstock'.  This looks especially good in the late afternoon, with low sun and the light quality that comes with the threat of heavy rain somewhere, when the purple almost appears to fluoresce (Verbena bonariensis will do the same thing in that kind of light).  One of my tasks for this afternoon will be to replant a potful of Centaurea, originally planted last autumn, which I noticed had been pushed half out of the ground by a determined emerging hyacinth snout.  Despite their exotic appearance, hyacinths are attractive to foraging bees.  My hyacinth pots this year have almost failed though, for the first time in 25 years.  They were stood outside, due to lack of space in the greenhouse, and only about three bulbs out of 20 have come through.  The bulbs looked fine and healthy when planted, so I presume it was too cold for them.

In the back garden I have some of the dwarf tulips, I think 'Ancilla' and 'Heart's Delight'.  They are cheerful little plants that persist well in the border, though sadly mine are blooming through a ground cover layer of sheeps' sorrel, as I haven't managed to get to that bed yet, as I work my way round the ravages of winter.

The only trouble with dwarf bulbs and an enthusiasm for self seeding is that hand weeding rather than hoeing is generally required.  I like spending time with the plants, and am resigned to the fact that the garden tends to be rather weedy.  Since I have no plans to open to the public I needn't worry unduly about other people's notions of how a garden should look.  But if you like things to be tidy then extensive bulb plantings anywhere other than in pots or naturalised in long grass probably aren't for you.

Addendum  The irrigation is running in the lettuce field, sending up sprays of water between the rows like a finer version of the fountain in the courtyard at Somerset House, and the fleece is shining in the sun as brightly as the sea.  If I were a keen (or even competent) photographer I ought to keep a photo diary of the lettuce farm throughout the year.  It could easily fill up a room or two at Tate Modern.  Unfortunately I am not a good photographer, finding that walking around trying to capture things in a camera prevents me from looking at them.  But somebody should do it.