Six on Saturday: Whirling Dervish?

The first ‘Tête-à-tête’ in the streamside grass for a start (although if you look closely it is more weed than grass these days) above, and one of several recently-emerged Clematis armandii ‘Snowdrift’ blooms below:

The garden screams ‘Promise’ at every turn, offering up joy on every ramble. Buds of Prunus mume ‘Beni Chidori’, tight little pink balls for several weeks, have begun opening and allowing yet another fragrant winter plant to delight us in these leaner months. A picture of the tree, below, does not give a good indication of its real impact, but at least the close up of some of the blooms does.

You can sense it in the slowly stretching evenings, the higher skies, the shifting quality of light, and the noisy chatter of birds. And you can see it in the flowering hellebores, witch-hazel and sweetly perfumed daphne, as well as the snowdrops, daffodils, cyclamen, aconites, crocuses and dwarf irises that have pushed their snouts through cold, wet soil to burst into determined, brilliant bloom.

Not surprisingly, I have been enjoying my witch hazels in recent weeks, from the moment they began flowering at the turn of the year. Some are perhaps on the wane now, but there is still plenty of colour on all of them. Why not come and admire them with me?

In 2024, design is taking a turn away from pastels and towards the boldness of jewel tones.

If there is a lesson to be learned about the rose above, ‘Phyllis Bide’, it is not to overlook what is in front of your face. Planted outside the front door a few years ago to replace, on a whim, the bright pink ‘Pink Perpetue’, the bud that this bloom opened from must have been in evidence before I noticed the fully open flower on Thursday, but I hadn’t seen it. Not that I was expecting to see any roses in bloom halfway through January, although it does sometimes happen – and admittedly it tells me that this is a rose I had forgotten to prune when I did my climbers back in the late autumn! The front of the house is in full sun for most of the morning, so the sunshine that accompanied some bitterly cold days this last week has clearly given Phyllis a boost. Overall, however, she has still been outperformed by her predecessor, and needs to pull her socks up to justify her front-of-house position.

I spent the morning putting the guttering round the newly covered chicken run, and also fixing some of the guttering at the back of the chicken house.

I did pop out in the garden first thing on the Saturday morning but that was just for Mark to take a quick photo of me and my Rhubarb. The first Saturday in May is Naked Gardening Day, yes it’s a thing, and the only thing you’re supposed to wear is a smile, so here’s my contribution.

It’s not usual that you can plan ahead for when you’re going to have to spend a day in bed, because you never know when you’re going to be ill. But later this evening I am having my first Covid jab and knowing how it wiped out my husband for an entire day was starting to worry me a little.

After the last couple of weekends being frantic, one with ringing for the Jubilee, and the other with a retirement party and collecting George from university, I finally had a weekend to myself and at home. Saturday morning was busy with shopping and getting pet supplies, the chickens eat so much. The afternoon was house chores and we had a BBQ in the evening which I managed to get it all cooked before it rained. There are 6 of us in the house at the moment so that’s a lot of food for a BBQ. Still the best thing about a BBQ is the left overs for the next couple of days.

I had a little holiday recently. I was hoping to keep you posted on where we were during my week away, but the wifi on the canal boat was a little hit and miss….well more miss than hit. Sometimes it’s great that way because you can really get away from it all.

Where has this month gone? Where has this year gone? I know the older you get the quicker times goes, but this is ridiculous.