A WEEK IN MY GARDEN 21 MARCH

Hello, and welcome to this week's blog.  To start us off here is my pretty picture of the week.  It's tulip turketstanica.  These have come back well for a few years and is such a dainty little thing.

Another sweet little bulb, and also reliable, is Narcissus Tete a Tete.  It would get a bit lost growing in grass as it is only 15 cm tall.  Here it grows in a border next to the drive in the partial shade from some trees.  It seems happy with this location and it means I get to see them close up several times a day.

I've bought this to pair with them.  It's Hacquetica which picks up that lovely deep yellow and has the same dainty quality as the miniature daffodil.  I first saw this growing at Knightshayes 'Garden in the Wood' in Devon many years ago and thought it was gorgeous.  There's something about the perfect little rosettes that reminds me of Elizabethan embroidery.   I'm so happy to have acquired one for my garden.

Roses coming into leaf

Garden jobs this week have included feeding the roses.  I use a granular feed  (Top Rose) at the start of the season and then switch to a foliar feed later on.  With 100 plus roses (and I seem to have ordered two more) this takes a fair amount of time.

We also found time for a little bit of shopping and found these terracotta lattice planters for these standard holly trees.  Their previous planters were those fibreglass lead look ones, but they had started to develop holes so needed replacing and these work nicely with the Haddonstone trough.

When I first laid out the front garden I planted some Hebe rakaiensis.  Here they are in 2020, perfect round domes with space for plenty of planting around them.  I think that was the first year of Covid, and like Covid these little domes grew exponentially.

Fast forward four years and they had expanded so much they were encroaching on the lawn.   In the photo below you can see that two of them have already been removed and relocated elsewhere.  We plan to move another one next week, and then decide what to replace them with.  Pittosporum was one possibility but I'm not yet decided and am open to suggestions.

Now we take a stroll to the Knot Garden which needs a lot of work to get it back into shape after the winter.  Last week I told you about the serious amount of weeding it needs.  We also needed to replace one of the Standard Photinia which had died.  Luckily the local garden centre had one just the right size and the garden looks so much better now it has been planted.

Dead tree in foreground

Lovely new tree

This week we also made a trip to see Coleton Fishacre garden in Devon.  There were some striking magnolias in flower.  We were very taken by this white one (unlabelled sadly) and  as we stood there admiring it we worked out just the spot for one in our garden.  Do you find yourself doing that?

The garden starts beside the house with this rill garden.

The rill spills over into a series of ponds as the water flows down the valley.

The rill, leading to the stream and ponds

The path eventually leads down to the sea.

The view down the valley to the sea

Apart from the magnolias, the other standout plant on this visit was the snowflakes growing under the tulip tree.

Unsuspecting Dad giving a sense of scale

That's all I have for you this week.  I hope you are able to get out and enjoy your garden.  We have a little rain forecast for tomorrow but it looks like another mainly dry and bright week ahead of us.

Thank you for reading and hope to see you again next time.