My Amaryllis

I used to have 5 amaryllis bulbs, I had them for many years, they flowered every February/March and I always took the plants outside during the summer. And in late autumn every year I took the bulbs out of the compost, cleaned them up and put the bulbs in a container under my garden bench for the 6 weeks that they needed to be chilled in order to flower again. But one winter we had a lot of rain, the water managed to enter the box where I kept my amaryllis bulbs and they all rotted. I had to throw them all away and that was the end of it – for quite a few years.

Ohhh, those squirrels!

I have a love/hate relationship with the squirrels in my garden. I should perhaps say ‘squirrel’, because I have only ever seen ONE squirrel at the time, and I don’t know if it is the same squirrel that I see every time, or if there is a whole colony of squirrels queuing up to come into my garden and make havoc, but squirrels can live for 20 years so you never know, might be just the same one that visits me.

Swapping plants – long distance

I have written about the plant swapping site I am a member of before, a site called Green Plant Swap, and the whole point with it is to meet and swap plants, basically to see each other’s gardens and perhaps find something you might like and see if whatever you can offer can be used to swap with whatever they have to offer. That’s fine if you live around the corner for each other or at least in the same city but what if you don’t do that?

March flowers in London

It has been a weird winter, with more rain than ever recorded – in 360 years I think it is, but the plus side of that has been the mild weather we have had here in London. Still no frost in my garden this winter, and I hope the rest of March, or April for that matter doesn’t have some silly surprises for us, like snow – the latest I have experienced snow here in London these 15 years I have been here was 8th April! The snow didn’t lay for more than a few hours but it was cold for a few days and the frost killed all the flowers that were out on my camellia. No silly things like that this year please!

Tree following, my Magnolia soulangeana

I have decided to sign up to a new meme called ‘Tree following’ and in my postage stamp size garden I actually have a few trees, the tallest tree, the Red Cedar is just over 9 m (about 30 ft) tall! I also have a rather unusual lilac, and a little conifer that died and now the tree stump is working as an obelisk for an almost 4m tall Passionflower - and I have a tall mature camellia – so big that it is a tree and no longer a bush. I used to have a tall holly tree too, but it had to be taken down when my neighbour built their extension and I am not that sorry to see it go, it was absolutely enormous. But I am not going to ‘follow’ any of these trees in dept, apart from mentioning them perhaps. No, the tree I am going to follow is a magnolia.

My Hellebores

Today the meteorological spring starts here in Britain and although some people stubbornly keep to the astronomical start of spring, which is 21st March, here in London 1st of March is a good time to start talking about spring – the gardens and parks have usually started their spring flowers well before this date anyway.