welsh hills again

I love tulips.  For a while in my gardening life I struggled to create the effects that I wanted until I had the blinding realisation that the problem was that I was not using enough of them.  Isn't it wonderful when the right answer is the exciting answer?  Now I buy in bulk.  I plant new ones in pots, some new ones in the ground and, when I can get my act together, some of the ones which were in last year's pots into the ground too.  This is the  counsel of perfection as usual and doesn't always happen.  In the autumn of 2010 I remembered in time to get quite a lot into the cutting garden.  Last year I lifted all my bulbs, failed to label them, left them to die down and failed to remember that they were hiding in a big pot in the kitchen garden. When I came across them in November when I was planting out my new ones I found that most of them had rotted or been eaten.  Some did go into the cutting garden and into beds in the kitchen gar...

At the moment I can hardly bear to come inside, or to go to work, or to do anything which takes me away from the garden.  Everything is growing: seedlings, perennials, bindweed, chicks.  The sun is warm, the grass is green.  I want to stop time and hold on to the moment but, since Professor Brian Cox himself says you can't - something about the Arrow of Time. I thought I understood it when he was speaking but it is gone, like so much  in my over full brain - my inadequate camera will have to do. I plant tubs of tulips every year.  Last year was the first year I have ever been really pleased with them.  That was largely as a result of admiring some gorgeous pots in mountainear's garden and discovering that she used far more bulbs than I did.  This years are even better. Out in the field the little orchard is looking more orchard like and these tiny tulips, tulipa linifolia, are spangling the grass before the wild flowers get going.  I lo...