Gardens

April’s Changing Seasons ~ Bleak With Bright Blooming Intervals

Here in Shropshire we’re back to wintery temperatures after last week’s four days of summer. The header photo was taken on Sunday up at the allotment – damson blossom against a stormy sky.

But despite the coolness, plant life seems to be thriving:

Out in the woods:

In monochrome:

As seen from Wenlock Edge and in the Shropshire Hills (on a hot day last Thursday):

And out in the garden:

Who knows what will happen next:

The Changing Seasons: April 2018

Please visit Su to see her changing seasons over in New Zealand

And More Up And Under Tulips

Sun still shining in Sheinton Street…

Six Word Saturday

A Daffodil Sea ~ What Can Be More Wonderful?

March at Bodnant Garden, Wales ~ follow this link for more photos and garden history.

Daily Post: prolific

Today In My Garden ~ SUN!

It’s hard to believe. The tulips can’t believe it either. Sunshine. Warmth. Blue Sky.

Cee’s Flower of the Day

Awakening To Poppies

Few garden flowers do awakening more flamboyantly than oriental poppies. They are true spirit-lifters. This one is also catching the early morning sun – along with a tiny crab spider. They are also very obliging on the renewal front, each year creating several suckers which are easily divided to make new plants. And if you cut them right back after the first flowering, you will be blessed with a late summer flush. Bees and hover flies love them too.

Their vegetation is fleshy with a tendency to break, but they are surprisingly hardy. The leaves have been up in my garden for a couple of months now. But I’m guessing it will be a good few weeks before we can enjoy this year’s round of poppy power. For now, the photos will have to suffice.

Daily Post: Awakening

Frigid February But With Flowers ~ The Changing Seasons

We’ve had gales, sleet, snow, frost, downpours and sunshine, lowering skies, gloom, dankness, glowing sunsets, and starlit nights, and throughout all variations it has been bitterly cold with far too many Arctic blasts and draughty peripheries. Yet despite the chill factor, some things seem to have been growing since December, many of them out of season.

For instance, up at the allotment this afternoon, I came upon a very confused globe artichoke. In the last few days it has grown some very chunky buds. Too soon, I tell it. It was also surrounded by a vigorous bouquet of spanking new foliage. In the garden at home a butter coloured geum has been flowering, one stem at a time, all winter. Likewise a blue penstemon. I have also been cropping the wild garlic leaves for several weeks. They are shooting up along the old railway line beside the Linden Walk.

All of which apparently tells me that it can’t have been as cold as I think it has.

Certainly the spring flowers have not been deterred – celandines, snowdrops, primroses, crocus, flowering currant and hellebores all quick off the mark – with daffodils just on the cusp of opening.

Here then are February scenes around and about the Farrell domain in Much Wenlock:

To join in the Changing Seasons challenge please visit Su at the link:

The Changing Seasons: February

Out In The Field With Runaway Crocus

Several things spurred me to the allotment on Saturday – sun, dryness under foot, onion sets in the post, and the need to get a 2” covering of compost onto the raised beds as per the ‘no dig’ methodology, a job I had forgotten to do in the autumn.

For once the field path was not all of a slither, and along the way I found these crocus (tiny in real life). Clearly they had grown bored with the confining domesticity of suburban flower beds, and so taken off over the garden hedges to try things on the wild side.

Breaking bounds with a flourish – one could learn a few things here…

Cee’s Flower Of The Day

All Of A Twitter ~ Yesterday In The Garden

It is one of those sudden joys. You can be staring out at a bleak winter garden, all dormant stems and leafless, when whoosh – like darts of light – the gloom is fragmented by a little host of twittering, darting long-tailed tits. Their dashing habit of course makes them hard to photograph, and their livery – all the colours of a winter landscape – adds to the general elusiveness. They are tiny too. And they rarely stay for more than a few moments before taking off again on the great insect hunt. When they have gone, the garden is bereft, but you are left with the feeling that someone just gave you a perfect small gift. You can conjure it again at any time, in your mind’s eye, that moment when a flock of tiny beings flew in and lit up the day.