End of Month View - December

It’s the last day of December and the last day of 2014 – time for a bit of reminiscence about the past year and also previous years. Today I have been blogging for exactly 4 years and written 292 posts. What started as something I was a bit curious about has turned in to a nice hobby I am certain I will keep doing in the future. I am not the most frequent blogger, however whenever I do write a post I usually write really, REALLY long posts with lots of photos. I kind of put blogging to one side and do lots of other things between each post, but then I realise so much has happened in my garden since last post – and I want to show you as much as possible, and I end up with very long posts each time. Sorry if you are the type of blog reader that prefer one-liners and just one photo, not much of that around here!

The first year I was writing I didn’t have many viewers, and hardly any comments, towards the end of the year I joined Blotanical, started to write much more about my garden – and got many more visitors. I can truly say, life in the blogosphere is much more fun with visitors than without; it was a bit lonely just writing to myself – so thank you to each and every one that has visited and commented over the years, please continue, your support means so much to me.

My most visited post was from June 2012, it is aptly called ‘Will it ever stop raining??’ But I can also see from the statistics that my tabs are well used, the Tab ‘Plants in my Garden’ has been particularly often viewed. And google.co.uk and google.com has graciously lead my way respectively 10.068 and 7243 searchers – possibly not all them were looking for a gardening blog but there you go, sometimes you find things on the net you never expected to find :-)

Today’s post is a mix of looking back at 2014, and showing you the view of the garden at this end of December. I have a movie for you today too, but first a few photos (not too many today!).

My garden on the last days of December, with lots of greenery here and there thanks to all the evergreens. I do enjoy the open, spacious feeling the garden has at this time of year, even though I also like my ‘Jungle Garden’ in September :-)

As usual my garden throws out the odd plants out of season, the ‘non-hardy’ geraniums on the shelf at my seating area are still producing one-off flowers, even though we are having temperatures down towards zero C and Winter Solstice was only 9 days ago!

The cyclamens will be flowering right through to end of spring, just as they should.

The first hellebores have been flowering for about a month already, this is Helleborus ericsmithii 'Winter Sunshine'.

And this is a single spotted Helleborus hybridus.

My Ferrari has started to flower. OK, not Ferrari but that’s how I remember its name – correct name is Viburnum 'Farreri'.

And the lovely Camellia japonica 'Takanini' is continuing to open one gorgeous flower after the other. Despite being just a tiny 2 year old twig, it has lots of buds and will continue to flower for a long time. I read on the nursery website where I bought it that when mature, this camellia could be in flower for 6 months every year, from beginning of November to end of April! But what really sold it to me, apart from the lovely red peony shaped flowers - was the fact that this camellia doesn’t shed its flowers one petal at the time, it just drops each flower neatly on the ground. Anyone who has seen the millions of pink petals on the ground from my other camellia will understand why this unique feature was so tempting to me!!

I am ending my last post of the year with a short movie from the garden. The movie is a mix of footage from yesterday and photos from the past year – as a sort of photo cavalcade to see how the garden has changed over the year. And of course there is some suitable music added. My videos are best viewed in HD, in full screen, remember to change the settings in bottom right corner after the movie has started so you get the best picture quality.

I am linking this post to Helen at The Patient Gardener’s Weblog.

All that remains is to wish every one of you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2015!
Here’s to a great gardening year 2015!

Until next time, take care,

Helene.