End of month view for February

Hurray!  February, my least favourite month of the year, is gone and March is here and surely it must be spring?  Early spring maybe, but spring nonetheless.  I am joining in again with the end of month view posts, hosted by Helen at Patient Gardener.  The discipline of taking photographs at month end is really useful and the record really interesting.  I am so glad I did it last year.  Especially when you are making a new garden, it is easy to think nothing is changing.  These photographs show that things are growing, the garden is filling, never mind that it is so slowly.

Here is the side garden.  The first photograph is last month's view at the end of January.  The garden still feels quite empty to me now and yet the two photos side by side show that foliage is appearing and the beds are filling.  The grass has not started to regrow yet and is still churned to mud on the way out to the field.  One day we will have a hard path going through the gate so that we don't descend into mud every winter!  The hellebores are out.  These are the flowers you can see in the foreground of the picture.  I love them, would love them whenever they flowered but at the end of winter they seem quite extraordinarily beautiful.

There is not a lot to see in the little orchard, although there is this cat in the big apple tree.

Get close enough and you can see daffodils pushing up.  Here in the field they are Tenby daffodils, narcissus obvallaris, the Welsh native daffodil.  They are small and upright, more robust that the other native daffodil, narcissus pseudonarcissus, which was Wordsworth's dancing daffodil.  These flower early and keep their flower well until the taller white Thalia begins to take over.  Around the swing there are lots more: February Gold (which never flowers in February and is in fact a couple of weeks later than the Tenby daffodil), Sweetness with a strong, sweet scent, more Thalia and some of the old double daffodil, Telamonius, which has been flowering in gardens in Britain since the early 1600s when our house was built.  It has been a labour, planting daffodils for the last few years, but a labour of love.  I have a record somewhere of how many I have put in but I don't want to think about it!  I want them to spread and naturalise and take your breath away.  They aren't doing that yet but they are beginning to clump up a little, flowering in fives and sixes rather than ones and twos.  It's a plan for the long haul.

Nothing happening in the cutting garden, zilch, nada, nowt.

The grandly called "Native tree walk" is beginning to show the snowdrops around the dogwoods.  I shall plant more snowdrops here, and winter aconite, and wood anenomes.  I must get ordering quick while I can still get them in the green.  I order from John Shipton and daughters in West Wales.  It's not a great website but it is a great nursery.  Send for their paper catalogue if you like native bulbs and flowers and while away a cold evening making lists and getting your tongue around the beautiful Welsh names.

By the drive the snowdrops have been joined by crocuses, crocus tommasinus, another one to spread and taske over I hope.

There is not much happening on the sunny bank yet although walk down to the stile and you will find that the heather is open for early bees.

The kitchen garden is the tidiest it will be all year.  The hellebore argutifolius, terribly prone to blackspot so kept well away from the hellebore orientalis in the side garden, is looking at its best too.

Signs of life, signs of spring.