End of Month View – April 2016

It is a whole year since I moved house and garden – amazing how time is flying! I had 2 moving days, one day with my house content where the huge lorry drove one trip with all my things from the house - and one day where the same lorry drove TWICE with all the plants from my garden. In my book that’s just the right priority!

This is how the garden looked the day after I had moved in. I took with me around 700 plants from my previous garden and got 100 crates for free from a company, and the crates turned out to be very useful for transporting the plants and storing them for a while in the beginning.

And here is the garden right now, after a whole year’s work. Still LOTS to do, lots to plant and many more ideas to try out, but I am getting there. One very noticeable difference is how late everything is now and how GREEN the garden was a year ago!

This photo is from March EOMV and I have done some small but important changes since last month. Spot the difference!

The most important change is that I have finally painted the white plastic tube with the electric cable to the shed which is hanging on the wall. It has been sticking out like a sore thumb on every photo I have taken from this angle, now it is painted in the colour I am planning for the fence and the tube is blending in better. When the plants start growing up the wall I hope the tube will no longer be noticeable. I have also removed another paving slab so I could move the bird bath one step further down, opening up for a path around the plumtree.

This area here is my Japanese inspired bed where all the plants are of Japanese origin. The lovely Salix integra ‘Hakuro Nishiki’ has got leaves since my previous post and soon it will develop the cream and pink leaves that gives it the common name of Flamingo tree.

The new path is to allow me access to the plants so I can tend to them, the flowerbed is much too deep to reach from the edge.

I am looking at different style stepping stones to put down on the path, but for now it is just an opening between the jungle of pots and containers.

Some of these pots can be dug down in the ground eventually and that will help keeping them moist during the summer, but none of them can be properly planted in the ground as the soil here is almost pure clay.

I have bought some more plants for the Japanese Bed, here in the foreground is one of them, a perpetual azalea, I hope it will live up to its promise of flowering 3-4 times a year :-)

I have also got 2 dwarf rhododendrons, a nice investment since I had to leave my 12 year old dwarf rhododendron Dopey in my old garden. These two are also part of the 7 dwarf series and are Doc, I actually only bought one, but the nursery sent me two by mistake!

I have been working on the Wall Bed too, although there are more still to be planted here. But all the plants up against the trellis are now in – 3 roses, one clematis, one honeysuckle and one jasmine. I hope they will cover the wall nicely in a couple of years.

The Rose Bed is also getting filled, only 3 more roses to plant and this bed will be finished. On the obelisk in the middle I have planted ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, a David Austin rose I bought in February last year. It gave me two roses last year and was just a tiny plant in a pot, this year it is already twice the size by now.

It looks a bit messy at the base at the moment, but I am tying in branches as they become long enough and hope to be able to get them to go round in circles on the outside to maximise the amount of flowers. And together with this rose I have a clematis – 'Warszawska Nike', which I hope will look gorgeous together with ‘Gertrude Jekyll’. I haven’t seen it in real life before, only online so I hope the colour is as I expect. Not long to go to see!

And which rose will be the first one to open here in my new garden? In my old garden it used to be ‘Crimson Cascade’, the huge rose I had growing on my fence. I left that rose for the new tenant as I couldn’t take such a big rose with me. It has been strange to go through the whole of April without any roses, but it has been so cold and everything is so late so in my garden there are only roses in buds. This bud is 'Susan Williams-Ellis'.

And this is 'Ingrid Bergmann' – and it is about time it warms up enough so the ladybirds can turn up, the aphids have been out for weeks munching on my roses so there is ample food for the ladybirds. Wakey-wakey ladybirds!

The roses might be very late this year, but I still have daffodils! I can’t remember ever having daffodils into beginning of May – a combination of very cold spring and me not getting around to planting them until just before Christmas. But even so, daffodils in May!! This is Narcissus 'White Lion'.

The strawberries I have planted in the raised beds are doing....not much at all. It is as if the garden is on hold, waiting for warmer weather. It has been very cold at night since beginning of February and many days in April has been colder than in January. The last week it snowed many parts of Britain and even though we didn’t get any snow here in London it was close to freezing in the evening and at night.

But some plants have slowly got there despite the weather, my inherited Syringe vulgaris is just about to flower.

As you all know, my cat died just before Christmas, but the neighbour’s cat keep coming over the fence and is keeping me company when I am outside in the garden. He likes to have a snooze in my Woodland Bed, and funnily enough, he has found his favourite spot right on top of a clump of mouse plants! Not sure if the mouse plants will like being flattened like that every day, but I am letting the cat sleep here for now. He could have chosen my expensive trilliums to sleep on – that would have been far worse!

The huge cherry tree in the car park next door is flowering right now, looking very impressive. This is probably a Prunus avium from what I have been able to find out, I am happy to be corrected :-)

The cherry tree looks like it is covered in snow here in the evening sun. I guess my garden will look like it is covered in snow, once all these flowers drop to the ground!

But when it comes to dropping flowers, I do have one in my own garden too – or two trees to be correct. The two ceanothus’ have an enormous amount of flowers and have already started drizzling blue dust everywhere. It is an amazing sight though, just give it another week or two and they will be completely blue. Can you see the apple tree in the foreground? When I moved in a year ago, the apple tree was completely finished flowering.

This year it hasn’t even started and all the buds look like this. A few days with sunny warm weather and they will all pop open I think.

But as long as we have such a cold weather, things develop very slowly and some of my plants still have to go into the shed at night. Here they are tucked up for what I hope will be the LAST night in the shed this year. But I said that last week too so I don’t know. Will this be it??

According to the forecast - YES! Just look at what we are promised the next 10 days – finally!

I have a movie from the garden for you today as usual, and today’s movie is in two parts with very different modes. I have used music from my homeland Norway this time, and I hope you enjoy it. As always, my movies are best viewed in HD in full screen.

The music was ‘In the hall of the Mountain King’  from Peer Gynt and ‘Sarabande’ from The Holberg Suite, both pieces by Edward Grieg.

That was it for today, next post is GBBD on the 15th May and I hope I will have lots of flowers to show you. Some sun and warmth will help, and especially getting warmer nights and mornings will do wonders. Even though I have had no snow in my garden this winter, and only two nights where it dipped just below freezing, it has still been the coldest 3 months I can remember in many years. I am ready for a change!

Until next time, take care.

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