Blossom time

The settled weather continues: dry, calm, sunny days. A cool airflow reminds you that it’s still very early in the season although growth in the garden might suggest otherwise. Peacock butterflies have been feeding on the drumstick primulas this week, and on Sunday we spotted an orange-tip feeding as well - very exciting! Bumble bees have been enjoying the flowering currant, prospecting nearby for possible burrows in sheltered, sunny corners. Mrs Duck is somewhere in the Walled Garden, very probably sitting on eggs, but we know not where. In avian solidarity, her two drake suitors appear most mornings on the Teacup lawn, leaving again by 9am. I’m not sure they provide any more than moral support, if even that. But the trio has been together for a number of years, so this ménage à trois is clearly an enduring one. Meanwhile in the lily pond, the toads have come and gone, a cloud of black-dotted spawn the only trace of their amorous sojourn.

The daffodils have performed well this year, with no high winds, snow or heavy rain to trample them. The ever- present off-shore cool breeze here preserves their blooms for weeks, and we have varieties, many planted by our predecessors 25+ years ago, flowering from February through to mid May. A useful continuum linking the early snowdrop season to the early herbaceous flush.

The blossom season too is well underway. We’re not in the same league as Hanami, of course, but this week the pears and now the plums have started to join the ornamental cherry, the sweet almond and the black cherry plum in flower. All these trees reveal their blossom before their leaves, fleeting canopies of delicate pink and white, often daintily speckled. Above our heads, bumble and honey bees hum in gentle appreciation. Humming trees are a thing, evidently, even getting a special mention on the Saturday Today programme’s Thought for the Day!

Ornamental cherry in The Slope Garden

In the borders, we continue to pick out perennial grassy weeds and creeping buttercup before the emergent and explosive herbaceous greenery once again carpets the soil. The dry weather has allowed us to hoe off the first flush of annual weeds, making maintenance easier during the season. And more plants we grew from seed this time last year and planted out last autumn are making an appearance, creating little moments of disproportionate joy!

Sweet almond

In the greenhouse, we have been sowing edibles to take advantage of this run of sunny days. Rocket and salad leaves seedlings appear to germinate as soon as you’ve planted them. Lettuce ‘All the Year Round’ will take a little longer, as will the Musselburgh leeks and spring onions. But they will appear when they’re ready. A couple of weeks ago, we planted the onion sets (‘Sturon’) directly into the raised beds and they are starting to throw out little green shoots. Not so many have been pulled up by the blackbirds this year (they confuse the ‘tails’ of the bulbs for worms), perhaps due to the rings of chicken wire we installed last spring to keep the hens off. The theory is good, but Mrs Brown, are largest hen, is not easily discouraged and was discovered last week patrolling inside one of the fenced enclosures. She clearly has perfected the art of vertical take-off.

And the grass has been growing. The lawns in the Walled Garden grow faster than those outside the walls, so they are cut every five days. But we do have a lot of moss in our lawns (perhaps we are slowly evolving into a Japanese garden?) so we don’t take too much off at once. We’ve tried but the moss really chokes the mulch-decks of the mower and looks dreadful afterwards, so little and often seems to work for us. And moss is helpfully green.

The Old Orchard

But with lawn-mowing comes lawn-edging! As you might expect, we use edging shears rather than new-fangled line-trimmers or those very expensive metal edging strips, but the downside is a fortnightly two-hour shuffle round the garden, trying not to forget all the island beds. One again, the Today programme comes to the rescue…