welsh hills again

Like Helen and some others, I have been asked to be an ambassador for Plant me Now, a garden centre selling plants online .  This means being sent plants to review which is not a hardship!   Before I made up my mind I looked at their website and I liked the way it had been  put together, focussing very strongly at what to sow and plant at different times of year.  This knowledge is something you take for granted as a reasonably experienced gardener but chatting to my daughter in law, the proud owner of her first grown up sized garden, I was reminded that when you are starting out this is the kind of thing that you don’t know, or know in a patchy kind of way.  So it is a helpful and well thought out site which would be particularly useful to reasonably new gardeners but which I can also see myself using. The first lot of plants to come my way are annuals , seedlings started off early which come as generous sized plug plants.  I mused a bit as to ...

Since I got back from Oxford I seem to have spent as close to every waking hour in the garden as possible.  Yesterday was another glorious, hot, sunny day, a day for suncream and gardening (a la Sarah Raven) not in jeans and boots but in an old skirt and flip flops.  But today has been grey and cool, oddly pleasantly so.  I have been moving ground cover plants down to the native tree walk, things that get out of hand anywhere that you want to cultivate intensively but are gently green and satisfying on bare soil - tellima grandiflora, alchemilla, self sown forget me nots.  They have been wilting and sighing in the heat but today they settled back softly in the grey green light, last night's watering still keeping them green and full throughout the day. I went seed sowing in the greenhouse again.  Ian has a big birthday coming up in the summer and I have become obsessed with having a celebratory garden.  I think this needs a blog to itself, or more, I co...