Spring is making her presence felt as she breathes life over the winter landscape. Dawn breaks around 6am now, reaching out with those wonderful watery rays of sunlight over the dew-loaded grass. Over the weekend, the mercury exceeded 14C in the walled garden and the Spring equinox is knocking on the door.
And Mother Nature is responding. The buds on the black cherry plum trees in the Old Orchard and Summerhouse gardens are starting to burst, revealing dainty, dark pink blooms. The pear trees are revelling in the solar warmth of their supportive brick walls in the Secret Garden, buds burgeoning in anticipation of April blossom. The Snakeshead fritillaries have made their serpentine appearance this week, twisting and unfurling under the old apple tree, and the canary-yellow cloud of tiny Tete à tete narcissi on the South Lawns have seemingly emerged overnight to trumpet Spring’s arrival. In the Summerhouse Garden, the Spring display of early bulbs has been bolstered by the colourful percussion section of the primula world, P. denticulata.
And the garden’s fauna is responding too. Tom’s bees have braved it across the greening meadow to pay us their first visit this Summer, enjoying the blue grape hyacinths I’ve been planting out this week. A couple of bumbles visited the greenhouse as I completed the last bit of winter maintenance, settling instead for the nearby hellebores and lungworts. And all the goldfish celebrated their first meal of 2025 as they emerged from their hibernant depths. In the lily pond, the toads have been creating courtship havoc, but this is only temporary as they will disappear as quickly as they arrived, returning this watery kingdom to the custodianship of the more refined newt population.
As the hours of daylight increase, so does the gardener’s activity! This week we’ve been giving the grass its first cut of the season. Not too much, just a light topping to take away yellowing tips and tufty clumps; it’s amazing how removing so little grass can make such a big difference, providing a fine level foil for each morning’s silvery dew, or hoar-frost, coating.
Following a second coat of paint on the refurbished windowsills, we’ve been tidying up the greenhouse’s winter-resident agapanthus. We have the evergreen A. africanus species, and it’s a useful exercise to remove old decaying leaves as well as a surprisingly large overwintering population of slugs!
In the borders, accompanied by the strong foxy scent of the emerging crown imperials, there are signs of early herbaceous activity with fresh foliage of lupins and thalictrum appearing. I sometimes think the vigour of emerging foliage in all its colours and forms is more interesting that the ensuing blooms. I’m hoping that some of the winter compost will be ready to throw on before the main flush in a month or so’s time, but for the moment, I’ve been hoeing off some of the forest of garlic mustard seedlings that have been germinating. We keep some, of course, as their white flowers are quite attractive and much beloved of early-season insects.
And finally, this week has been rose week. The Hybrid Teas have had their annual primp and prune! We like unfashionable plants here, and hybrid teas embody the 1970’s, which is probably when some of the original shrubs were planted. We have 52 at the moment and they are pure divas. They have their own borders, they have the best soil in the garden with regular dressings of compost, they get two feeds of special rose food per year and each plant is lovingly pruned by hand. And every spent bloom is dead-headed. Is it all worth it? Totally, each plant blooms pretty much continuously from June until Christmas, each flower a perfect bloom with its own scent ‘note‘. This week I’ve been pruning them but not all the prunings go the bonfire pile. Some become hardwood cuttings in the cuttings garden; not all will take, but some will, as was the case with this year’s two recruits for the chorus line!
Just lovely.