A pixie, a wizard and a green man

I seem to start every blog this year by apologising for being so absent – this month I have been so busy I didn’t even think I would be able to put together a blog post but I keep taking gardening photos all the time and I managed to film last Friday so here I am again, writing a last minute post.

The Serendipity Garden

The time has flown away for me again – I am sitting here with 3 hours to go before the end of March, trying to put together a post about what’s happening in my garden right now. I have been so busy my feet is hardly touching the ground so this post is going to be brief and I will let the photos speak for themselves. There is an end to all this – well, I keep reminding myself that, although the amount of red tape the council has managed to create regarding my bathroom renovation is astonishing. I still haven’t got a start date for the work, but I am slowly getting there – I hope!

Naming my garden - GBBD April 2016

As a foreigner living in Britain, English is a language I am still learning – even after 17 years here in London. I still bump into words I have absolutely no idea what means and I love looking them up and see their meaning and history. Some words just jump up and down and do a little dance for me when I see them, some words are just hilarious whilst others give me a lump in my throat. Have you heard the word ‘Discombobulate’ before? What a lovely word! And what about haberdashery?? I absolutely love that word too. OK, so the title of this post is naming my garden. I have thought about doing that for a while. Well, to be honest, I have thought about it for many years, but I never really found a good name. I know it is quite common here in Britain to name your house, at least if you live in a countryside cottage or in a somewhat grand house. Naming your house in a council terraced 2-up-2-down in East London would probably have raised some eyebrows, so that was never on my agenda. But my garden? The most important room in my house? Sure! ....But what?

A slow approach - March -16, EOMV

We have just had another storm here, it’s become much easier to keep track of the storms since they started giving Atlantic storms names too, and with storm Katie just passed the total are now 11 this season. That’s more storms than usual - and Katie hit us hard here in the south-east, we are not used to proper storms. I am amazed though how sheltered my new garden is compared to just the front side of the house, and thanks to this I had no serious damage after storm Katie. But there were plenty of minor damage, and most of the daffodils that were in flower are now broken and I have taken those that could be rescued inside in vases so I at least get to enjoy them for a few days before they go off. There were camellia flowers ripped off in the high winds too and there were lots of overturned pots, but no serious damage. Next storm on the list is Lawrence and there are another 9 names after that again, ending with Wendy. Plenty of scope for more storms before the season is finished – I sincerely hope we won’t have to use the whole list this year!

EOMV February 2016

In some places around the world, spring lasts about a week, it is an explosion in nature, the snow melts in record time and suddenly everything is bursting out in green and colours everywhere. In London it is a rather drawn-out affair that lasts about....well, I would say it lasts about 6 months or so, since most years we don’t really get a winter to talk about. Autumn usually ends beginning of December and although it says winter on the calendar, it goes straight into spring mode with spring plants and bulbs emerging from there on. And the official spring starts from 1st March so now I can look back at what kind of ‘winter’ we had: no snow on the ground, and 10 minutes of a few flurries in the air one very late night. That was the snow. As for frost - one frost night in November and one in February where it dipped just barely below freezing in my garden. We might get another frost night next week, but it will probably be another one just barely below freezing, if at all. I realise that London is an exception, just a few miles from here it has been much colder and places like Oxford and Cambridge has had down to minus 7C many times this winter. The day temperature has been lower in February than in December and January, which was unusually mild. It all evens out in the end!

End of Month View – March

Last month I showed you the new rose bed, all the changes I had done and everything I had planned for this bed. Today, a month later, every plan has been thrown out of the window and my whole garden looks very different. I am hoping to move house soon! I still haven’t got a final decision and it might be another whole month until I know for sure, but I have to plan for a move and hope for the best, because once I get a decision, things will have to happen fast.

Tree following - hard pruning

It’s time for the monthly post about my two Magnolia soulangeana, the two trees I have growing in containers on my patio. Last month, in May, the leaves had come out and the trees looked very different from April’s photos. This month the changes are more subtle.

Tree following, arrival of leaves

It’s already gone a whole month since last time I wrote about my tree, my lovely Magnolia soulangeana 'Heaven Scent', so now it’s about time for another update.

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.

Scent from heaven!

In my previous post I hinted that I had bought a tree, but not what kind of tree. I guess it is time to reveal what exactly I have bought? For those of you who know my garden well through my many photos, now is possibly the time to start wondering if I have lost my marbles...a tree, in my tiny garden? Where am I going to put it? Well, let me first remind you that I still have my huge conifer at the bottom of my garden, which no one really sees on my photos, only the tree trunk. You can see the conifer in its whole, tall glory on a previous post here.  And only 5 months ago I got rid of an 8 m tall holly tree next to my seating area, so my garden is no stranger to trees, but I am not replacing my holly tree with this new purchase, it needs full sun and will have to be placed on the sunny side of my garden.