I’m still around

Have you been looking for news from my London garden? Sorry for being absent for such a long time, but my short stay in hospital for a simple stomach operation turned out to be a bigger ordeal than expected. I contracted pancreatitis as a complication from the operation and although I am now home from hospital I am still recovering and will be for a while. I haven’t done any gardening the last 2 weeks, but I have been able to enjoy some of the marvellous weather we have had lately. Finally summer came to Britain!

What’s flowering in my garden – and what’s not

It is the middle of the month again, we have reached May - and it is time to show what’s flowering in our gardens. Her in London we have experienced the strangest spring ever, with a relatively warm winter, a dash of high summer for a few days in March and then over 5 weeks of rain and persistently cold weather with very low night temperatures. My garden has never been as late as it is this year.

What’s eating my garden?!

We have sunshine! After something like 35 days of rain, either during daytime or night time – or both, we have finally got a few days with sun :-) I spent yesterday outside in the garden, and although it was a chilly wind, the sun made up for any lack of feeling of warmth.

A small miracle

I suppose we should almost have got used to the rain by now, after all it has rained for one month and 2 days straight. That, according to the Met Office, makes us qualified to collect the award of wettest April since record began more than a century ago. The rain has also led to unusually low temperatures and the gardens in London where I live are now really late compared to normal years.

It’s still raining!

With the risk of repeating myself – it is still raining and it is a weeks since my last post where I was moaning a bit about the rain, although grateful enough that I didn’t have to water my parched garden, but enough is enough! Since Thursday the 5th April it has rained EVERY day. Not bucketing down all the time, and not all through the day, but we have had rain every day at some point either during the day, evening or night. And it is still raining.

Be careful what you wish for....

Here in London we have had the driest two winters on record, and after the snow we had in the first week of February it hardly rained a drop. Finally the government decided that we were to have water restrictions and a hosepipe ban introduced on the 5th April as our water storages are at the lowest on record. I am on a water meter and pay per litre for water I use, so I really hoped we would get some rain soon for my parched garden as the free stuff from above doesn’t come at any cost or any work at all.

Make your own Bonsai trees

The art of making Bonsai trees is truly a unique and special hobby, but oh so rewarding. Not for the impatient gardener though, as Bonsai trees grow veeeery slowly! Growing Bonsai is a Japanese art form using miniature trees grown in containers. Bonsai can be created from nearly any perennial woody-stemmed tree or shrub species that produces true branches and can be cultivated to remain small through pot confinement with crown and root pruning.

April bloomers

It is Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day over at Carol’s May Dreams Gardens, a whole month has passed since last time, where did it go? Here in London we have had all sorts of gardening weather, mainly dry and fine although cold, but the last week we have finally got a bit of the long awaited rain. Not enough to call off the hosepipe ban that was introduced on the 5th April though, rumours say we might be stuck with the water restrictions the whole summer.