A glimpse of Spring

On Saturday, we had a glimpse of Spring after a run of either very cold or very stormy days. While it’s been hard for the gardener to plan tasks over this turbulent period, the garden has not shared this state of hesitancy. The bulbs have been mustering, throwing up long shoots of fresh green, tantalising us with their emerging buds. The early daffodils, including the river of Tete à tete running through the border by the Summerhouse, are now contributing their cheery yellow trumpets to the congregations of snowdrops and Winter aconites which have been heralding the arrival of the New Year. Saturday’s warm sunlight saw the serried ranks of little purple Crocus tomassinianus under the old apple tree finally reveal their bright orange centres, a salute to a brighter sun.

This year’s Dawn Chorus has been recruiting! According to our Merlin identification app, 10 species have now joined the avian choir, but I’d be expecting further recruits as we get into April.

And for the first time this year, the goldfish have surfaced from the depths of their pond, little orange submarines shoaling around quite the thing like children running round the playground on their first day back! Our fish stay out all year; they were still active until well into November but have been pretty much dormant since early December. It will be a few weeks, though, before we start to feed them…

With apologies for the murky water!

But what gardening this week? Weather reduced my hours outside but this was a week of widging (if there is such a word!) creeping buttercup crowns out of an area of border in the Summerhouse garden. I couldn’t get to this area last summer as it is well-planted with tall shasta daisies and achillea, so had become somewhat impenetrable. Widging is a time-consuming but very effective task, especially if you have emerging hyacinths and narcissus to contend with. And it can be pleasurable if you’re listening to something interesting on 4 Extra.

During the winter storms, our white magnolia snapped its hawsers and came away from the east-facing wall. This is a beautiful tree and in April is smothered with ivory candles before its leaves emerge. It looked sad hunched over the border like Quasimodo, but I didn’t know whether I’d be able to lift and reattach it to the wall, as the main branches were really quite established. However, will-power stepped in and hopefully not too many grey furry buds were sacrificed restoring this prehistoric relic to the vertical.