welsh hills again

Does this count as nearly half way?  A couple of days so busy that there was not a space to get out into the garden.  I countered that by thinking about which plants I would have if I had a much smaller space.  I didn't get very far with that but in a couple of weeks I have been invited to go with a friend to Chelsea.  I am so looking forward to it. Today I more than made up for a couple of days off.  I planted all the plants I had bought earlier in the week.  The white foxgloves went into the side garden, currently being lit by the flame of this smyrnium perfoliatum.  I bought it years ago from Great Dixter.  It took a while to settle in but now it self seeds just enough to make it interesting. It is a triennial, the only one I have ever knowingly possessed.  This makes it even more important not to weed out the plants which have no flower spikes as they will sit quietly in year two before exploding into lime green gorgeousness in year ...

  The blossom on the wild cherry is perfection in its white delicacy.     In the garden the intense yellow green sings of May,  here smyrnium perfolitatum, a triennial. And here euphorbia characias.  If I were an insect I would live in it.   Or maybe in these magnolias.  Look at the thick creamy sculpted flowers.  What a home they would make.   Out in the orchard the apple trees are coming into flower.     And in the pots in front of the house an explosion of orange tulips: Ballerina, Hermitage and Couleur Cardinal.  Can we just hold the moment for a little longer?

Some plants take a long time to actually arrive in your garden.  Maybe you read about them, see a picture or admire one in a garden you are visiting.  You put it on your mental or not so mental list and then somehow you fail to find it and it hangs around as a vague aspiration, something you like the sound of but are not so driven to have that you track it down like a rare animal.   It must be years since I first read about smyrnium perfoliatum.   I liked the idea of something other than euphorbia doing that vivid limey, yellowy green which seems so much the colour of spring, but spring intensified, spring squared.  I liked the name too and the way it rolled around your tongue.  But I never saw it anywhere as a plant or as seeds and was a bit put off by the sense that it was slow and tricky.  Still I kept an eye out for it, just in case. I bought one tiny plant at a visit to Great Dixter, my first and only visit so far, which my blogging ...