April 12th 2018

Apologies, dear reader, for missing last week’s posts – I have but two words by way of explanation: root canal.

As someone who has spent more than their fair (time)share in the dentist’s chair, it seems anathema to civilised society that one should have to pay so much money, to have so much pain inflicted on them.

But every cloud, as they say…

With another few hours ahead of me tomorrow, I can crack on with garden reading. I was going to say something about calming frayed nerves, but perhaps that’s a little close to the bone…

As ever, the garden herself offers much in the way of soulful comforts.

Of course, you take the rough with the smooth.

A goose beheaded a couple of tulips – but I daresay she had no idea I’d been waiting so many months for them to arrive.

And since she didn’t actually eat the damned flower, I can only hope she meant to take it as a gift for her broody sister who is currently refusing to leave her nest. I’m sure it ended up trodden into a puddle of s**t quite by accident…

 

Anyway.

There are flowers in the garden!

We have blossom in the Japanese garden:

 

Star magnolia (magnolia stellata) being all stunning and beautiful (this one’s had a troubled past – it’s a veritable garden hero!):

 

The star theme continues rather decoratively in the little centres of the Forget-Me-Nots. These native superstars romp along in joyful abundance in our garden. I admit, I can’t actually remember when they hit their best (I recall blue skies above and blue clouds below, but not the temperature for clues alas), but I know they’re on their way to blooming into full carpet, because the advance guard have started to arrive, in an extraordinary range of blues, pinks, and purples…

Sadly my camera battery was failing as I took these, but I think you can still just about see the promise. Blue will follow, but the early flowers in our iron-rich clay are girlishly demure…

I can’t wait for those effulgent clouds of blue to erupt and take over – the anticipation is definitely half the fun!

To be honest, most of the garden is a frightful mess. (The moss garden needs a good weed… like everywhere else!) All my energy has been going into the hedge-gone-wild, because I don’t just want to cut away the dead, I want to try and transplant the healthy plants to other areas, and that’s both time-consuming and rather hard-going.  To quote an Orc – ‘the trees are strong, their roots go deep’.

I don’t go to the gym, I garden…

How are you all getting along now the Winter King has finally unleashed his worst?