The garden's looking a lot more vibrant now. The lawn is nice and lush, and the flowerbeds are beginning to fill properly with vegetation from the perennials as the bulb foliage begins to die down. I love the bulbs, but I do hate the 6 week or so wait with all the leaves hanging around afterwards!
I've done a lot of sorting out on our patio, including finishing off planting herbs in containers so that they are easy to access from the kitchen (this includes: mint, lavender, sage, rosemary, chives, coriander and parsley plus a bay tree outside, and some basil sown inside for the windowsill). There's also some sweet peas in a container with canes in to provide support, and this year I'm growing salad in containers as it'll be easier to protect from slugs, as well as being easier to cut when it's just on the patio! The other plants are a couple of roses (one a wedding present, one a new home present when I moved into my new house in Newark in 2006), and fuchsias, some of which I've grown from cuttings. When it gets a bit warmer I'll also be growing tomatoes on the patio.
Which herbs would you grow? I think those I've mentioned above are all the ones I use regularly in cooking.
This is one of the plants I bought on the day out to Clandon Park. There are already tiny gooseberries growing! I hadn't had gooseberries in years, but I was inspired by some we picked and ate in a crumble when I went to stay with Mostly Knitting last summer.
This is one of the first borders in the back garden that we planted up when we moved in four years ago. I think we did this border about three years ago (we didn't do much in the first year as we wanted to see what came up where and when). These plants were chosen to be very drought-tolerant, which is a bit ironic considering what the weather was like over the winter. There's a hebe, which actually used to be in a pot in the front garden. The convolvulus has never flowered as much as this before, I think it likes the warm weather we've had this year. Behind it there's a couple of ornamental grasses.
These are the English bluebells, which we planted about three years ago as well. The rest of the garden has been colonised by Spanish bluebells, which I dig out every time I find some!
First flowers on the strawberry plants!
The clematis is covered with flowers this year too. This one is "The President", the same variety I had at Newark as well. This one was from an offer in Gardeners' World magazine.
And cherry tomato plug plants potted up.
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