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Spring arrived here this week. Every year I feel that there is a day when winter clothing suddenly feels much too much and the sun has real warmth to it. The cats have deserted their bed by a warm radiator and taken over the conservatory chairs again. The birds are busy, busy and so are a few early bees. Best of all, things are growing again.
Nevertheless, it’s a slow process for colour to start reappearing in the garden. Our daffodils have opened at last, and there’s a scattering of blue and white Anemone blanda and some yellow primroses. Amongst these spring flowers, the hellebores are still holding their own. They flower for weeks, bridging the period spanning late winter and early spring with their glorious blooms.
This year the hellebores have done well. They’ve become much more sturdy plants, with many more flowers than I’ve seen on them before. Both photographs here are of ‘Rosali’ from the HGC ‘Ice N’ Roses’ series, which I planted last year. I hope that this newer hellebore will turn out to be as robust and resilient as other older varieties are said to be…time will tell!
Hellebore ‘Rosali’, with its flower looking like a tiny umbrella.
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A couple of weeks ago, I was disappointed to see that rain had flattened the crocuses and turned them to coloured shreds. So it was a happy surprise to find another group a week later. (A different variety, but still with my favourite purple colouring.)
I don’t have a lot of crocuses in the garden and some are now in awkward places that are hard to get to, so difficult to photograph. Others were planted in more accessible places but have been accidentally lost when moving other plants or planting something new. Eventually, when the borders are a bit more settled, I’ll try to reserve a few areas where they can grow undisturbed. (But this year there is too much reorganisation going on in the garden. Maybe next year?)
For now, these bright little sparks are providing a touch of enjoyable colour in the garden. They also filled the gap before the daffodils began trying to steal the show. To be honest, I don’t have many daffodils either. (They tend to get disturbed by replanting of the borders too, even though they’re planted much deeper.) In the future I’d like to add considerably to the spring bulbs here – every flower is valued at this time of year!
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Hellebores are resilient plants. They need to be, given that the weather in very early spring can be anywhere between sunshine and gentle breezes to the blast of high winds and freezing rain or snow. This year we’ve had a fairly benign mix – quite a lot of rain but sunshine too and no gales around here.
I did worry that this hellebore and the others that are planted beside it might suffer in the gusts of chilly air that are sent out from the air-source heat pump that we recently had installed. The heat pump works by extracting warmth from the air around it so the air it pushes back out is very cold. Luckily, it turns out that the airstream is just enough to the side of them not to be damaging.
Unfortunately, the site that had to be used for the heat pump meant that a path and a low retaining wall had to be dismantled to make room for it. Now both path and wall will need to be reinstated and the hellebores may be in the way. If possible, I’d rather not move them, especially when they seem happy in their present position. Hopefully, if I do, they’ll survive and bring more joy to next spring.
(Meanwhile, I’m wondering what has laid its eggs on the flower in the top photo…do you see those white ovals? Not slugs or snails, which have round eggs. Not to worry, I suspect the rain we’ve just had will have washed them off!)
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The unusually wet weather has been very destructive to the crocuses this year. I don’t have many here, and those that have flowered have been quickly flattened by the rain. They end up looking like tiny scraps of brightly-coloured silk lying on the ground.
Luckily, other years have been kinder to these late-winter flowers and to the early bumblebees that were able to enjoy their nectar. (Crocuses are nicely timed to feed bumble bee queens that have just come out of hibernation.) The photographs here are from a sunny February a couple of years ago: at the top is ‘Prins Claus’, while the flower below is ‘Pickwick’.
Right now there is still one relatively undamaged group of purple crocuses which haven’t yet been rained flat. I can’t get at them to photograph them without tramping on a lot of wet soil (and thereby compressing it), so I’m unlikely to photograph them this year. But I can at least enjoy the sight of them and maybe the weather next year will allow me to photograph them then. Here’s hoping!
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February has brought the opening of hellebore flowers in my garden. Along with a scattering of snowdrops, they’re the first of the year’s flowers. (Although there are still pink flowers on the viburnum ‘Dawn’ and yellow ones on the winter-flowering jasmine. But they’ve been around for quite a while now.)
It’s a cheering sight to see something pretty at last, after a rather wet and muddy winter. And now I have something that makes me want to be outside in the garden with my camera…or else indoors in my little studio, as with the flower below. I reckon that I can promise that there will be more hellebore photographs here very soon!
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Last year I created a small bog garden here to make it easier to grow moisture-loving plants. For inspiration beforehand, I went to see a bog garden at East Bergholt Place. This is a large garden and arboretum which also has a plant centre (‘The Place for Plants’). Although my own bog garden is tiny – just five foot in diameter – I reckoned that being able to see what was growing happily in a large and well-established bog garden would be useful.
This garden is only about 16 miles away from our home, but the conditions are very different. The soil in it is naturally moist, due to there being a high water table and there is plenty of shade from large trees. (While walking around I noticed how damp the ground was underfoot. And being in the shade made it an excellent place to spend a very hot afternoon.)
The bog garden sits along the banks of a narrow, stone-edged stream that runs down from the area of a large formal pond. The damp soil here supports very lush growth which hides much of the watercourse.
A very small part of East Bergholt’s bog garden. You can just see the stone edges of the stream.
The structure of the bog garden at East Bergholt is obviously entirely different to my own one. Mine is entirely artificial, created by using an old tent groundsheet to trap moisture. (I first made holes in the groundsheet with a garden fork and then added a layer of stones and gravel to provide some drainage.) But I’m hoping that many of the plants that grow well at East Bergholt will be fine for my bog garden too.
I made the bog garden with the intention of providing suitable conditions for astilbes and Siberian irises. Other plants in it now include ragged robin (Lychnis flos cuculi, AKA Silene flos-cuculi), purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and a red hesperantha that had been struggling in too-dry soil elsewhere. (It is much happier now!)
Left: primulas, hostas and irises along the damp edges of the stream. Right: a view over the formal pond uphill from the bog garden.
It was reassuring to see the astilbes and Siberian irises growing well in the very damp soil at East Bergholt. There were lots of candelabra primulas,which were in full flower on our visit in mid-May last year. From the photographs, you’ll see that there were also ferns and hostas and I spotted the blue flowers of camassia and the pretty leaves of Alchemilla mollis too.
There is one thing that is worrying me a little about having made a bog garden: what will happen if we get a lot of rain over a long period? There are drainage holes in the groundsheet I used to line it, but they may not allow water to escape quickly enough if there is too much. The danger then is that roots may rot. But that is something I will just have to look out for – and my fingers will certainly be crossed!
Although the bog garden at East Bergholt was the focus of my attention, we did take the time to see the rest of the garden and arboretum. There is a formal garden area beside the house with lawns surrounded by topiary and hedges, but I preferred the arboretum, with its beautiful trees and flowering shrubs. The wilder area of the ‘lower garden’, with naturalistic planting and a large, totally informal pond was delightful too. I’ll be happy to visit this garden again!
Candelabra primulas were the star of the show in May.
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Last year my husband and I joined other visitors on ‘The Great Garden Trail’. This is a summer-long event for which volunteers open their gardens to raise money for the St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich, Suffolk. Gardens of all sorts take part in the scheme, big and small, filled with exciting plants, or more modestly planted. Some of the gardens are the setting for interesting historic houses and occasionally there may be a village with many of its gardens open to explore.
Otley Hall turned out to be in the ‘modestly planted’ category. I would have been disappointed if I’d gone there just to see the gardens, but I also love Suffolk’s quaint medieval houses, so the visit was worthwhile.
I couldn’t help but stop and admire the massive chimney, which looks as if it was built to impress anyone approaching the door.
Built in the early sixteenth century, Otley Hall is said to be the oldest house in Suffolk to have remained ‘largely intact’, with some parts of the building added later in the same century. Timber-framed buildings from medieval times are a feature of Suffolk’s countryside and many of its towns and villages. They make you feel as if you could step back in history by just walking inside them. (But we didn’t go inside this one – it was only the garden that was open on our visit.)
In the garden itself, my attention was captured by the beautiful irises which were in full flower, especially the white iris above, with the little hints of colour, and the blue one below. (Our visit was at the end of May, a little too early for the many roses there to be in bloom.)
The main flower borders edged a croquet lawn, one of several lawns throughout the gardens. Other grassy areas featured a labyrinth, ‘The Mount’ – an artificial mound which allows views of the surrounding countryside, and an H-shaped canal. (The house still has a moat on one side too.)
Otley’s ten acres have a mix of both formal gardens and informal, more natural grounds. For example, near the house there is a small ‘knot garden’ with box hedging and herbs planted up in a classic Tudor-style design. Elsewhere there are woodlands and hedgerows, maintained to encourage wildlife and areas planted up with wildflowers.
Formal and informal, clockwise from top left: wisteria on an arch beside the house, abelia growing beside a lawn, irises along the wilder edges of the canal, a vetch in a wildflower area.
The combination of traditional and wilder areas gives an easy-going feel to a stroll around the gardens of Otley Hall. It’s not the best garden for a plantaholic to visit, but it does offer a pleasant afternoon with the opportunity to see a fine example of a medieval timber-framed house. (It has an excellent cafe too…coffee and cake is an important part of our garden visits!)
There’s a walk beside the moat which allows a glimpse of the back of the house.
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I have Covid (for the first time), so I’m using it as an excuse to take it easy this week and just re-posting a photograph from 2019. Sometimes I get lucky and there’s something still in flower when the first frosts arrive. This is the rose ‘Zepherine Drouhin’.
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The Allium christophii seed heads pictured here are held motionless in the thinnest coating of frost. On a freezing winter morning the tiny seed pods, and the remains of the flowers behind them, gleam softly in the early sun.
It has just occurred to me that it’s unusual for a seed head to retain the remains of the flower like this. The petals have lost their colour and their edges have curled inwards. They’ve shrunk a little as they’ve dried too, but those petals are still there. Now they are little icy stars.
You can see what those stars looked like while the flower was still alive:
The living flowers are lilac, with a delicate metallic sheen. Already the green seed pods are forming in the centre of each individual floret. If you look closely you’ll see that there’s also an inner ring of filaments. (These are the lower part of the stamens, which would have held the anthers.) Their tapered, almost spiky, appearance makes them look like another set of much smaller petals.
Now my imagination is playing with the idea of having the ‘ghosts’ of the year’s flowers sprinkled throughout the garden. For company, the alliums would have hydrangeas (as in last week’s post) and perhaps, if there were any late flowers, astrantias. (But in both of these plants, what look like petals are not. The hydrangea has minute flowers surrounded by showy sepals and the astrantia has large bracts around a tiny pincushion-like arrangement of true flowers. Perhaps that is why they keep their flowery appearance for longer.)
Hmm, I wonder if a slightly spooky winter garden would be fun… 🙂
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During winter direct sunlight doesn’t penetrate along much of one side of the garden. Photographing plants in this area can be frustrating. Even if they have a good coating of frost, they don’t catch the sun to make that frost sparkle.
Taller plants, like those here, do get some sun for a very short while, so there may be just enough light to make photographing them worthwhile. The light changes very quickly at this time of year, so the opportunity doesn’t last long.
A climbing hydrangea is just tall enough to catch the light.
Happily, January brings a gradual increase in how far the sun reaches over the garden fences and tall shrubs, over time illuminating more of the smaller plants. By the time spring is here, the sun will be high enough to allow me to take photographs throughout the whole garden. That is a time I look forward to!
Meanwhile, it occurs to me that I should plan to place the plants that look good when frosted in places where they will catch a little sparkle of sun. (But not somewhere too sunny, otherwise the frost may melt before I get outside with my camera.) I may be developing my own style of garden planning – ‘hortus photographicus’, hehe!
A frosted Daucus (wild carrot) seed head lurks on the dark side of the garden.
Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature 