welsh hills again

I never garden in winter.  I can't really see the point of winter gardens with dogwoods and snowdrops even though I have plenty of both.  In winter I come inside and read and knit and crochet and write.  I hate getting cold and wet in the garden and I quite like it every year when the time comes when everything stops growing and there is nothing I can do.  It is done for another year.  Close the door, light the lamps, pull your chair to the fire. This year however I have turned my back on the garden in a big way.  Usually in winter I do at least some thinking and dreaming.  By January I am starting to engage with the idea of gardening and I might read about gardens or spend time making up plant lists or musing about what to do in one area or another.  This year I did none of that.  I had lost my gardening mojo.  I had fallen out of love. I think there were two strands to that.  One was the extent to which over the late summer an...

I wish I wasn't so erratic about gardening.  I really thought I had cracked my tendency to lose interest in the garden in August.  Inspired by Karen  I have begun to engage with September and October in the garden and while my first love will always be spring, I have come to love the golden light of late summer and early autumn.  Maybe it is like a biological clock - you know, the stuff about whether you are a morning or a nighttime person. Perhaps you can have the same thing with times of year.   I have been keeping gardening diaries for ever. Year after year the detailed planning entries and commentaries on what is working and what's not from the early months tail off in mid July into disgruntled little notes "Looks tired", "No colour", "Everything's flopped" or even worse the pages of emptiness where I have clearly got fed up with the garden and gone walking. But the thing about Helen's end of month view posts is that the discipline m...

Is the year slipping away from me?  I took the photos for last month's end of month view post but somehow they never made it to the blog so here is a two for the price of one blog because the record is so interesting and useful.  It makes you stop and look and think. Here is the side garden at the end of June: The oriental poppies are still in flower and the blue hardy geraniums and simple orange day lillies. By the end of July the hardy geraniums and poppies have been cut back hard although the day lillies are still going strong.  The gazebo is up for a party with some friends who live in the US and are over here for the Olympics.  We had a great time with them and other friends who came up to spend time with them.  This makes the garden look quite formal which is misleading!  It is not. By the end of July the stars of the side garden are Crocosmia Lucifer and a persicaria given to me by a friend.  The fennel too is soaring and the rudbe...

Slightly belatedly, here is my end of month view for the coldest, wettest April I can remember! All the ground in the side garden has filled up with foliage, day lillies, peonies, hardy geraniums, jostling with euphorbia and hellebores, these last still flowering away although the flowers are slowly turning to a pale, creamy green.  The colour here is mainly from tulips.  These are Hermitage, a new favourite. Out in the field the little orchard is beginning to come into blossom and tiny tulipa linifolia is showing through the lengthening grass. The apple blossom is in flower. The peas are out in the vegetable beds. The new native hedges are thickening up and beginning to deter dogs and small boys from crashing through. The annual meadow is sown, fenced off from said dogs and small boys, but seems to be growing mainly scruffy bits of grass.  Sigh. There are bluebells in the hedge bottoms, as always lovelier than anything I can create. ...

This spring's big garden project, now that the barn is done, is the sowing of annual wildflowers in the area by the compost heaps and the fire site.  That makes it sound very utilitarian!  I hope the end result won't be.  I have tried to establish perennial wildflowers in the new orchard higher up the field.  A perennial meadow is a much harder task than I had understood when I started out.  The native daffodils are doing well and some of the spring flowers are fine, with primroses and cowslips establishing and a surprising burst of sweet rocket sitting at the edge of the skirts of the apple tree.  Last year we had ox eye daisies, yarrow, fox and cubs as well as meadow buttercup, plantain and some of the lovelier, finer grasses.  But the knapweed and the field scabious were single, solitary presences and there is clearly far too much of the lush, tough grasses like Yorkshire fog.  I have tried to sow yellow rattle to weaken the grass but my two s...

So much dry weather and, over the last few days, so much wind.  With our stony free draining soil my garden is desperate for rain.  Today we will do things in order.  Come out of the kitchen door with me and turn left into the side garden.  Ignore, if you can, the lengths of cast iron guttering piled on the rotting table, waiting to be painted and giving a gentle air of Steptoe and Son to the area by the door. Here is the side garden, oddly quiet and green just now.  The hellebores are still holding on to their flowers in the foreground but the daffodils and tulips have all gone over and the peonies and the oriental poppies which will be the next overflowing of colour have not yet started. So most of what is happening is foliage: fennel and hellebore and dicentra here.   For the first time that I can remember it was obvious today that the hellebores and peonies were wilting in the searing wind, after weeks of dry weather.  I always mulch in ...