Not much gardening getting done but plenty of enjoyment and alfresco dining. On Sunday I had my breakfast of croissant and coffee whilst sitting on the bench half-way down the garden.
We’re well into May and the hawthorn tree in the fence border is in full bloom. All the aquilegias are coming out: purple, dusty pink – there’s even one of these growing through the gooseberry bush which is far too thorny for me to pull it out – and the almost black & white aquilegia Magpie. Although it has been glorious lately I haven’t put out the pelargoniums yet (flowers just visible in the hawthorn photo) in case of a late frost. Some days are very chilly with sea fret, so my clouts get cast off and put back on by turn. The old adage, ‘Cast ne’er a clout, till may be out’ always springs to mind but does it mean may as in hawthorn blossom or the month?
Everything is coming out at once! In the courtyard garden, the green-leaved heuchera, often called coral bells, has sent up its flowering spikes: these are coral-coloured but the ones on my purple-leaved heucheras are white, or will be when they open. Potentilla sanguinea, with its scarlet buttercup-like flowers and its silvery, strawberry-like leaves, has started to bloom while the real meadow buttercup is popping up on my No-Mow-May lawn and in the fence border and woodland garden where it has seeded. On warm days I can detect the scent of the repeat-flowering lilac, syringa Josée, from the courtyard. Delicious!
Wild flowers just grow without any management, watering or staking. My type of plants! Here’s the buttercup again, in the woodland garden with cow parsley, tall and frothy with fern-like leaves. Red campion, which has bright pink flowers, rather than red, is quite a favourite, too and I leave it to mingle with its neighbours in the borders where it has self-sown. The ribwort plantain comes every year in the old meadow, the last survivor from a packet of seeds given to the guests, including my granddaughter, at a wedding. The photo I took the other day isn’t very clear so I’ve included last year’s from June, when the flowers were beginning to open.
The bearded irises are out around the laburnum stump along with all the other things that have sown themselves there and which I shall pull out later to ensure the iris rhizomes get the good baking from the sun that they need in order to flower. The perennial cornflowers, centaurea montana Sweet Sultan, originally from my mother’s garden, are in flower in the woodland, seemingly coping with the shadier conditions there, and also in the sunny front garden. I have chives in flower in the kitchen garden but these I planted around the Katy apple tree and they look lovely with the forget-me-nots, I think, but then forget-me-nots are my absolute favourite. Behind the ‘halfway’ bench, the choisya ternata is in bloom. I planted it there to turn the seating area into a scented bower! Its common name is Mexican orange blossom.
Another favourite wild flower is cardamine pratensis, commonly called the cuckoo flower because it comes out when the cuckoo starts to call. Here it has self-sown in the alpine garden but it’s been popping up in my beds and borders since April; I’m still waiting for it to appear in my lawn during ‘No Mow May’.
I don’t expect to hear the cuckoo. It’s a rarity for this garden. My garden records show the first time we heard it here: 19th May 1980 David woke me at 5am to hear a cuckoo! After that there were just a handful of mentions, with the last one being in 2012. Watermark J, however, is back from her holiday in France and has texted that whilst there, she not only heard a cuckoo but saw it, too! It was her first sighting. I’ve never seen one.
Hazel emailed me: Have spent a merry half hour watching the seagulls v jackdaws in your chimney – I wish you could see the fun, but you can maybe hear it! The jackdaws have the front right hand side pot – and were there before the seagulls. However Mrs SG is on the nest, but when Mr SG comes home to watch her lovingly, there’s this smaller black bird trying to get past him to the pot! JD is quite nifty, and tries ducking and diving, and eventually taunts him so much that Mr SG sets off in hot pursuit of JD, who cuts back and does a nose dive into the pot! If you see a JD with a squashed nose, you know where he lives!
I wondered what I’d been doing at the time Hazel was watching these antics because I don’t recall hearing the commotion. I was obviously engrossed in my own gardening activities and in a world of my own as my diary entry relates:
Thursday 18 May 2023
A warm, muggy day. Watered the house plants and repotted my echeverias, making cuttings and increasing my stock of orangey-pink-flowered ones which are my favourite. Pulled out the spent grape hyacinths at the front to fill the garden waste bin. Whilst doing a part-exchange of the fish pond water I got distracted by a flock of small twittering birds (couldn’t see what they were) and then a female sparrow hawk flew to the fence near the bottom of the garden. There are signs of recent sparrow hawk activity: three piles of feathers in the garden. The meadow buttercups, Sweet Sultan cornflowers and snow-in-summer are coming out. I’ve started harvesting my own lettuce leaves.
And here are my newly-potted echeverias on the landing windowsill. The greenery you can see through the ribbed glass is part of my kitchen garden which runs along the side return. It consists of crops growing in containers for me and self sown wild flowers for the butterflies & bees.
Granny Grubbypaws' Garden 