The top pond cherry tree has exploded into pink candy floss and most mornings I am to be found wandering around in my PJs admiring the bejaysus out of it. It is an absolute corker. Keeping up the pink theme, the apple trees in the orchard are taking over from the pears in the blossom stakes and giant balls of darnera peltata have punched through the leaves of the omnipresent persicaria by the stream and around the bottom pond. To add a cooler note and cut through the sugar rush, my favourite early clematis has gone into overdrive, covering the herb garden seat with spidery blue and white flowers. (In my hope springs eternal way, I have taken a couple of cuttings though, in the incredibly unlikely event they take, I haven’t a clue where I’d put them). Last but not least in the favourable mentions, the bottom pond camassia has managed to synchronise with the marsh marigolds in the approved manner and it is glorious. I planted some extra camassia this year as they were a bit disappointing last year (overrun I think by lysimachia which I’ve been trying to eradicate) and this has paid off. I may stick in even more next year.
Alas, the weeds have been pushing on as well, so I’ve been here there and everywhere slaying buttercups and winkling out sorrel. With the hot weather our clay has baked hard and it’s been a case of practically carving the roots out with my new favourite weeding knife (how did I manage before??). I’m trying to improve the soil and then mulch as I go so I’ve been up and down with barrow loads of compost and shredding from the willow slightly more than was perhaps wise for a woman with a dodgy hip. Despite my having dug out absolute barrowloads of roots in the autumn, the convolvulus that ran rampant through the back of the greenhouse borderand invaded the upper stretch of the stream last summer has started to reappear. Not a lot, just a few shoots so far, but I’m winkling out as much as I can as soon as it appears and loaded up the “dabber of death” to apply topical treatment to the rest. Its days are numbered….
The great plant reshuffle is ongoing. A pink potentilla that had to be parked in a pot to make way for a new dwarf mahonia at the front has, after much hemming and hawing, gone into the greenhouse border. I’m thinking that it might, in the fullness of time, play host to a late flowering clematis. It was looking a bit tragic last week and I rather feared I’d killed it, but I’m sure I saw a tiny leaf yesterday. They are hardy little things so my fingers are crossed. Clearing the edges of the path, I found a Japanese anemone had sent shoots into the gravel so I winkled those out, together with some path companion poppy seedlings, and rehomed them down by the pond in a patch freed up by weed eradication. I’ve also found homes for the remaining delphiniums I grew from Raymond’s seed last year, which had been languishing in the coldframe. It looks like most of the ones I planted in the autumn have survived the snails, thanks, I suspect, to the daytime ministrations of the lovely pair of thrushes I keep seeing down by the nuttery and the evening efforts of what seems (by the poo) to be a sizeable array of hedgehogs. (Yes I have googled both hedgehog poo and the collective noun for a group of hedgehogs). If I can protect the delphiniums from the wind we should have a good show in June. On that front, I bought a whole lot of rebar earlier in the year and my first go at bending a bar into a support for a peony which had outgrown its one worked pretty well. I shall be ramping up production forthwith….
Just as I was dusting off my knees and admiring my newly filled poppy and anemone patch, Keith broke the news that he had taken delivery of a vast number of dahlias for which spaces must shortly be found. There are apparently 24 new dahlias. Thus far I have found spaces for maybe 8. It would have been 10, but when I dug down into a perfect two dahlia spot I encountered, yes, two dahlias I’d not lifted last year and which seem, against all the odds, still to be alive. I now have to wait with bated breath to see if they will leaf up…. I shall be out patrolling the grounds tomorrow looking for likely spots. If all else fails I suppose I can always empty out some tulip pots.
