I love this time of year
OH GODS, GODDESSES, NATURE SPIRITS AND BESOTTED MIDDLE AGED WOMEN, I LOOOOOOOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR. 
My bulbs are mostly a little behind themselves this year. Some of this is probably because of the extended stretch of unusually cold weather this winter.* Some of it is probably because some of the bulbs got in rather, ahem, late. Ahem. But they’re all coming up, bless their pointed little heads.
Yes, there are lots of stakes in this garden. ** But the one at the particularly bizarre angle up against the wall isn’t a stake but a brace. It’s holding the apple tree up, which, later in the year, is inclined to lean over and embrace people. When it’s heavy with apples–and it becomes very heavy with apples–you pretty well have to crawl under it on your hands and knees, and that’s my heavy traffic path. Not to mention lack of ground space for hands and knees at the same time, since that area in front of the greenhouse–you can see its dark-green girders on the right–is where all my Little Things in Pots Waiting for Something to Happen sit.
Apple blossom. Speaking of apples.
Explodadaff. I can’t believe I ordered these. Either someone sent me the wrong thing–a trick usually most magnificently manifested by rose nurseries, in my experience–or they were one of these ‘order this that you do want and helplessly receive this which you don’t’ offers. And when I’m in bulb-planting frenzy, I plant everything. Salt shakers, old batteries, hellhounds. The hellhounds usually dig themselves up again.
And I have epimediums after all!!! I thought the frost had nailed ‘em. I think the frost had nailed them and they just did a little hey-presto and produced a new batch of flowers overnight. I swear they appeared out of nowhere. Usually you see, like, buds first.
I think these are darling, of course. They’re pink. But in my heart of hearts I believe epimediums are supposed to be yellow. Peter has yellow. So he’s going to hack a bit off for me and next year I will also have yellow.
That fuzzy green bunny eared thing on the left (there are three of them, but you can’t see the other two very clearly) in the second tier of pots in the big white pot . . . is a meconopsis, one of those extraordinary blue Himalayan poppies. It takes two years to grow one. Three years ago I had a beautiful one growing with a huge flower head on it . . . and when it was just ready to pop, something knocked the pot over and broke it off at ground level. I have been a vicious ratbag to the neighbourhood cats ever since, since I don’t think there’s anything else around here with enough body weight to have knocked it over that comprehensively. It took me a year even to regain sufficient morale to try again. This year I may start posting armed guards. Or at least teach the hellhounds to patrol.***
And . . . I just love pansies. Some day I’m going to do a Pansy Only Photo Entry. These are the most extraordinary colour: yes, orange, brick-red and plum, all together.
* Bronwen was here again tonight and she and Niall and I foregathered in the cottage sitting room and rang handbells^. While Niall was explaining the finer points of plain bob minor to Bronwen, my eyes kept rising involuntarily to the grow light which is still hanging–tucked up above harm’s way for any but the tallest heads–from the big beam that holds the ceiling up.
^ And were periodically investigated by hellhounds, who seemed to feel that handbells were no bar to hellhounds on the sofa.
** And after yesterday’s en route raid, there will be even more.
*** I admit I am hoping the hellhounds’ mere existence will prove sufficiently discouraging. I haven’t seen a cat in this garden since hellpuppies arrived, even though they stay inside their fence.
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