January 2nd, 2017 - cottage garden plants

So here is the garden on the second day of a new gardening year.  The front:

and the back:

Some pots have permanent planting: grasses, catmint, hardy geraniums, honeysuckle; just one plant per pot.  The rest have only tulips, new ones put in each year.  My daffodils are all in the borders.

You can see I have cut nothing back yet.  I could have done but I didn’t get round to it before it was too cold to enjoy being outside and we like the look of it as it is.  I feel that everything above ground provides insulation and habitat for all the wildlife we need.  The birds have been feeding every single day and foxes, cats and squirrels are all visiting.

I’ll cut all the dead stuff off as soon as we get a lovely blue sky day in early Spring.  I love the first gardening day of a new year.  You never know when it will be.  I don’t see working in the garden as tasks or jobs to be done.  I see it as a reason to get outside and potter about.

What can we look forward to first?  A few snowdrops I hope, then hellebores, fresh green coming up everywhere, buds on the magnolia, early narcissi.

Common celandine will come up everywhere and I used to curse it as a weed but now I just let it flower and don’t try to fight it. I would never win.

Every day brings something stirring.  And on TV there’s Big Dreams Small Spaces starting this week.