It’s hard to believe. The tulips can’t believe it either. Sunshine. Warmth. Blue Sky.
Gardens
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.
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:
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…
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.
Long-tailed tit Go here to find out more about them and for far better images than I managed here.
copyright 2018 Tish Farrell
In My Garden ~ Hellebore Herald Of Spring
Good chum Lesley bought us this sweet little hellebore. Thank you, Lesley!
Fallen Apples At The Allotment ~ Black & White Sunday
Come Hail, Gale, Snow, Frost, Rain And…
…the hesperantha in the garden is STILL flowering – albeit translucently and only at her stem tips. She has been buried under a foot of snow for nearly a week, frozen and defrosted, and refrozen. Then we’ve had downpours and mighty windstorms. I don’t really know what to make of her, other than to give her a big round of applause. She’s been flowering continuously since August.
Jolly Good Year At The Allotment
Winter At The Allotment
It looks pretty dreary on the plots, and these days the only person I see at the allotment is an elderly man who likes to walk his dog around the perimeter path. But there’s still stuff to harvest – parsnips, carrots, leeks, kale, perpetual spinach, Swiss chard, purple sprouting, and in the polytunnel lettuce and various Chinese mustards. There are also 8 compost heaps to turn or add to, and now is the season for collecting leaves to make leaf mould. I’ve filled three new bins with leaves from the wood, and last autumn’s caches are beginning to rot down nicely; I’m hoping they’ll be ready for spring sowing. So despite these gloomy looks – all is filled with new possibilities.
