February 24th, 2018 - Pots and containers, Wildlife gardening

I’ve just been abroad for 8 days and wondered what changes I would find when I got home. Here are Six things I can tell you about the garden today…..

One

I was in north Norway and it looked like this.

North Norweigian coast- fabulous and beautiful landscape

I couldn’t see any signs of Spring myself but I’m sure the Norwegians could see loads of them – I suppose you need to know how to look.

Just look at these fabulous colours that they paint their houses.

Houses in the North Cape, Norway

I’m drawn to these colours.  Our home is decorated in soft golden and brick red and in the garden too we have the yellow gold of brick paving and the red of pots and parasol.

Adding warm colours to the greens – terracotta and golden yellow

The golden yellow and the brick red look so warm and lovely together.  Given the Scandinavian climate I’m not surprised they paint their houses these lovely colours.

Two

Back in the garden,  I believe this grass is eragrostis trichodes. It’s looked like this all winter and I had thought I’d killed the one in the second photo by cutting it down in autumn.  The untouched ones are doing fine although flattened by the weather.

Eragrostis trichodes -last year’s growth broken by snow but still alive

However, the good news is that I can see new green shoots coming up through the crew cut I’d given it.  It isn’t dead. This is how we gardeners learn by trial and error. I guess at some point I will comb through last year’s broken leaves to make room for the new ones as they don’t look very good like that do they?

New growth coming through!

Three

Here is a hellebore that’s doing its thing but I just don’t like it much. It’s a good plant for pollinators early in the year so I don’t mind having a few but really it doesn’t lift my heart in any way.

Dark maroon hellebore-don’t like it much

Four

Now this little pulmonaria that’s come out does lift my heart and I love it.  I’ve got loads all over the garden, some white (Opal), some blue (Blue Ensign) and some pink/red.  They are great for pollinators, providing food early in the year.  They really are a sign of Spring.

Pink pulmonaria – known as common lungwort.

Five

It’s definitely time to prune summer flowering shrubs – but I think with the cold weather coming next week everything will hunker down and stop growing for a few days.  I feel I can wait till it’s not so cold before doing those jobs.  Here is a honeysuckle which has put on loads of buds but I’ll be cutting them all off very soon.

Summer flowering honeysuckle covered in new buds hanging onto an obelisk.

Why?  Well because if I don’t, the whole thing will be a huge tangle of massively long branches with flowers on the very end and that’s not very useful.  If I cut it down now to a few feet off the ground, the new shoots will flower on new wood and be a manageable size. So the books tell me. Frankly I don’t really have the confidence to know what I’m doing but I’ll have a chop at it and see what happens.

Six

Feeding the birds.  I have 6 bird feeders around the garden and I know that they will all have been emptied within two or three days of us going away.  I feel bad because the birds will have continued to come to the feeders, using up precious energy expecting to find food and will have found them empty.   I buy birdseed in 12 kilo bags which would last about three months.  I’m refilling every day or two.

So on this lovely sunny day here is my Six and I hope you will look at the propagator blog to find other people’s Sixes.

And by the way, yes we did see the Northern Lights but I don’t have a photo as I just looked at them and hoped they would imprint on my brain.  And it was too jolly cold to hold a camera.