welsh hills again

Another day of just a little time for connecting with the garden.  I decided to use it for a bit of plant buying and fifteen minutes weeding in the cutting garden. These are mainly plants for the side garden which is a traditional English (or in this case Welsh) cottage garden, appropriate as it sits alongside a seventeenth century Welsh farmhouse.  I bought three more foxgloves.  Out in the field I let the native foxgloves self seed and there are lots of them up by the shepherd's hut.  In the side garden I prefer the white or pale ones.  I also bought some violas and three more hollyhocks.  Violas really like a bit more moisture than our soil offers but I do have some viola labradorica which has settled in very happily.  These have larger flowers so are likely to be a little fussier but the soil here has been mulched this year so you never know. And three more hollyhocks, one black and two pink.  Hollyhocks ought to be happy up here b...

I have always loved cyclamen.  When we first came here nearly nine years ago I longed to establish cyclamen, both autumn flowering cyclamen hederifolium and February flowering cyclamen coum.  I must have bought ten plants of each variety and most of those have simply disappeared.  I longed for them to naturalise and to fill the dry shade under the tree in the side garden but it seemed that only one or two hung on.   Then suddenly this autumn I saw the slender flowers gathering quietly under the tree, certainly twice the size of last year's patch.  Now the flowers are going over and the equally beautiful marbled leaves are patterning the dry soil.  I love them.  They can double and treble and multiply to their hearts' content and I hope they will.  This is an image from the RHS which perfectly captures the delicacy of the flowers. I have written before about Plant me Now , an online plant sales business, and I have always been impressed with t...

I have been reviewing plants from the online plant nursery Plant me now  right over this year and now is the time for winter bedding .  For me, winter bedding means plants that I use in pots, planted on top of layers of bulbs for spring.  I am very inclined to leave my garden be in the winter and come inside by the fire but I do plant up seven big pots before I give up and turn my back on it.  It is choosing the bulbs for the pots, especially tulips,  that really gets me going so I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed choosing other things for colour and form over the winter.  Last week the order arrived and I had a lot of fun unpacking it all and potting some of it on as I am not yet quite ready to do my tulip pots. As usual, the plants arrived well packaged and well grown, not huge but bigger than many plug plants which come from other nurseries.  I had ordered two different types of Viola Sorbet. This one is Viola Sorbet Lemon Blueberr...

When I was a child I loved the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, especially "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe".  I also adored "The Magician's Nephew" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader".  I remember sitting on the edge of my bed with a brand new copy of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" in a white paper bag on the bed beside me, a present from my mother.  I could practically feel it singing to me.  I took it out, and looked at the cover and turned it over in my hands and put it back in the bag so that I could have the pleasure of taking it out again.  I knew that once I started to read it I would gallop through it, reading on the lavatory and in bed and on the bus to school, until I started to feel travel sick, reading at the table with the book on my lap until my mother caught me doing it.  I was a voracious reader and a fast one and the book would soon be finished, so spinning out the time before I began was a necessary part of extending the...