Winter garden
THE PLAN WAS THAT THEN I WAS GOING TO SHOW YOU A COUPLE OF PHOTOS FROM THE GARDEN TODAY TO DEMONSTRATE HOW FAST THINGS RAMP ON THIS TIME OF YEAR. AND THEN PETER TOLD ME WE’RE DUE TO GET A FROST TONIGHT. WE’RE WHAT? YOU MUST BE JOKING. IT’S THE MIDDLE OF MAY AND IT WAS OVER EIGHTY DEGREES LAST WEEK.
And this is England, and we’re due a frost. And I have chocolate cosmos and osteospermums and busy lizzies all over the place, including the one osteospermum that made it through the winter and is now covered with huge buds which are beginning to crack . . . no, no, no, I will have to bring that one into the kitchen, I can’t bear it. This year’s osteospermums are just little things in pots that don’t even want to be potted on yet; they’re fairly portable on a tray. I have probably half a dozen second-year snapdragons too, but they’ll stand a wisp of frost . . . it better be only a wisp . . . but the chocolate cosmos have to come indoors too. I am not going to be without chocolate cosmos.
This is from February. It was fine in February. And yes, that’s my bell tower: this is the view from my office window. I wasn’t joking about the tower being only two garden walls distant or the way the sound of the bells slides through the crevices and runs down the walls and pools on the floor. Why everyone who lives in earshot isn’t compelled to learn to ring I cannot understand.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. This is from February too.
This was also fine in February. . . .
Spring garden
This was about a fortnight ago, when I still had some tulips. This is, as you regular readers will have surmised, the cottage garden. I did tell you it was small. I was not joking. Note, for example, thermometer about to be overcome by enthusiastic rose. Never mind, I don’t need to know the temperature. And in foreground, rose waiting to be actually PLANTED in that, ahem, planter, instead of merely set inside it, still residing in the plastic pot I bought it in. (The rose, by the way, is fine. I tip it out of its pot about once a week, and check.) If the camera pulled back a bit, you would see a lot of other little things huddled round my ankles waiting to be potted on. . . . they seem to cluster round the kitchen door for some reason . . . Might have something to do with that’s where I shove things that have just arrived in the post and I don’t have time to deal with them now.
And of course you can sit on a chair and put your cup of tea on the little cafe table. You just have to move a few plants first. You have a problem?
And the miniature picket fence, as regular readers will also have surmised, is the Hellhound Containment Feature. Obviously it is capable of nothing of the sort: but it went in when hellhounds were still short and couldn’t get over it (not that they didn’t try). Dogs are fortunately creatures of habit and, crucially, hellhounds never come out here except under my hard, suspicious eye and the result is that they’ve never tried to bounce casually over it which they perfectly well could. They may be slightly discouraged by the quality of the landing. There is nowhere on the far side of the fence to put a foot down. Not flat, anyway. And they may have small, fine paws but they have four of them. Yes, I (and my big feet) have a very interesting time working in this garden, especially when I’m carrying spades, buckets of tools and/or compost and fertilizer, large green bags full of weeds etc.
Things that manage to get potted up or on congregate on the far side of the right-hand fence waiting for something final to happen.* This is also inevitably the high traffic area: the greenhouse, and the steps down to the road, run to the right behind that bit of fence; to the left is the raised path that runs round the inside of the wall and provides you with the concept of separate beds. In practise things that like gravel have colonised the path, and since I’d run out of room before I moved in, I have also sort of . . . um . . . forgotten where the path edges are, so I can plant things over them.
* This frequently merely means a larger or more decorative pot. You can squash more in, in a tiny garden, in pots. Especially when all the plumbing in Hampshire is running underneath it, three to six inches down. Watering, however, is a nightmare, especially once things get going and you can’t see what you’re doing, or where one pot ends and another begins.