Spring board

As well as being seduced by Instagram,

I have been brought to a grinding halt by my old computer.

Now I have something new and shiny 

but I don’t know if it will let me load photos

or what anything will look like.

So here goes:

I know that magnolias are rather old hat now and are mostly

a rather thickly padded brown carpet for most of us

but I wanted a record for posterity anyway.

Moving swiftly on, we have apple blossom,

and lambs.

The garlic persists but with added flowers

Wood anemones are holding their own,

but have been joined tentatively by bluebells.

The Open garden season is upon us

and tulip mania is in full swing.

Today has been so warm that the belted Galloway

have sought shade under the hawthorns.

Well nothing about this short post went well.

Clearly an iPad is not suited to this sort of endeavour

and despite the tranquil scenes you see above

I have been tearing my hair out and gnashing my teeth

on the other side of the screen.

I cannot scroll.

I cannot stop the typeface reverting to Times Roman.

I cannot break a line without it inserting an initial cap.

I cannot enlarge the photos.

I cannot prevent the whole page from flicking back up to the top

While I type.

And there’s that blasted cap.

I must regroup.

It will be Autumn leaves before we know it 

and the whole summer will have gone unblogged.

Bear with.

Fly past

Suddenly it's springy.

The crocuses have swiftly succeeded the snowdrops.

The daffodil cyclamineus, 

with its swept back petals in the background

emerging from last year's leaf litter.

Scotney Castle reflected in the still-watered moat

on one of those perfect windless days.

A robin auditioning for The Robin Who Showed the Way

in the Secret Garden.

The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall

and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill,

merely to show off.

Nothing in the world is quite as adorable as a robin when

he shows off - and they are nearly always doing it.

The robin kept singing and twittering away and

tilting his head on one side,

as if he was as excited as she was.

The sun setting at nearly half past five.

The luxury of extended daylight

easing me out of hibernation.

And this weekend -

summer apparently!

Perhaps this sign spotted last weekend

was not so incongruous after all.

Thinking little

If I do precious little in the flower garden, that little is directed

towards providing for what will give us the maximum reward

for the minimum effort over the longest period, 

and into that category come bulbs, 

particularly because from bulbs come all those really early, 

brave forerunners, by many weeks, of spring.

Last year I ordered a huge quantity, 

intending to cram the garden with them.

When they arrived it was blustery and cold 

and I spent a horrible couple of afternoons 

on my knees, with a trowel and my nose too close to the soil, 

my hands throbbing and smarting as I worked.

I loathed those little wrinkled, warty bulbs 

and there were a very great many of them,

and they were all very small. . .

But one of the eternal laws of gardening 

is that suffering and labour are rewarded,

and from January to April we had a succession of flowers

 when everything else was black and bare and depressing;

tiny iris reticulata, with their spotted, recurving tongues, 

in darkest purple and an amazing Cambridge blue;

a special, creamy early crocus, and another the colour of sea-lavender. . .

So far, so Magic Apple Tree, but Susan Hill goes on to list 

tiny narcissi, two or three inches high, with fragile, nodding heads

and names like Angel's Tears and Hooped Petticoat,

blue drifts of Grecian windflowers, anemone apennine, scilla, tritelia.

I clustered the bulbs anywhere, between shrubs, in the grass, under fruit trees

and when they came up, they were perfect,

and it was one of the most successful gardening jobs I have ever done.

It is possible that there are bulbs out there that I have forgotten about

and I shall be pleasantly surprised if they appear, 

and I do know I planted some new tulips, but drifts -

no, I have never managed drifts of anything.

I am reminded of the well-meant encouragement 

given by certain celebrated gardeners 

to enjoy planting a garden even if you only have a window box.

This was once particularly poignant as I struggled 

to keep a pot of supermarket basil alive one summer

after watching one of the aforementioned presenters

wheeling away a barrowload of the stuff to turn into pesto.

Hocus crocus

The natural and the unnatural.

Springing

In

and out.

Thunder and lightening

Warm enough to be out tidying 

the front garden in a T-shirt.

And then deluges

accompanied by thunder and lightening.

Very strange for late October.

I found a bag of last year's bulbs.

Rather wizened.

I have planted them in a fit of guilt.

Perhaps a miracle will occur.

Ahead of my game

Even if I do nothing else for the garden,

I have vowed,

(people always vow, confess and admit

in magazine lifestyle articles don't they?)

that I will do bulbs properly this year.

No sooner had these L'Innocence hyacinths

arrived, than they were tucked into

glass forcing vases and put into a dark place.

They might even flower in time for Christmas

which would be a first.

Next up, the Paperwhite narcissi

but I must find a way of stopping them from flopping.

Edited to add, this from Rachael.

Light bulbs

Just over a week ago.

Quite hard to believe.

The rain today is of the 

persistent lowering kind.

More is forecast for the weekend.

The lower the light levels fall,

the bigger my bulb order gets.

Catching up

I should be planting bulbs

but I'm late.

I'd like to be the sort of gardener who 

can listen to exploding fireworks, 

smug in the knowledge that hundreds of narcissi,

tulips, and alliums  

have long since been interred in pots, lawn and borders.  

Sadly there won't be any hyacinths flowering indoors

for Christmas because I didn't force them in time

and I haven't even received my Paperwhites yet.

I'm going to have to plant these with more support this year

as artfully balancing them on pebbles

has more than once resulted in an unwieldy mass

of toppling foliage.

I have got a few sprouting crocuses and muscari.

Sarah Raven advised planting crocuses in a sunny spot

to encourage them to open fully.

The shyest of our visiting cats pinpointed

the ideal position under a silver birch

visible from the kitchen window.

By the time I got out there,

he'd skedaddled.

Let's hope the squirrels weren't watching where I put them.

Green flames

My first bowl of Paperwhites

were up and over in a blink of the eye.

I started again and am willing them to last

until Christmas, but I swear I can hear them

growing.

The heating is restored,and the mild weather 

helped to minimise the inconvenience,

but it was a good excuse 

to warm up some apple juice with

cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice and brown sugar.

It's nice on muesli too.

Prioritising

Son to mother,

" I'm just wondering,

who these are for.

Are they for us?

Or

for the internet ?"

Well both really.

It's my birthday

and 

I have my new friends to think of.

A day like this

Outside the air was delicious. 

She could feel it stroking her face as she moved through it, 

but there was no sensation of either warmth or chill...

she wondered why she found this particular temperature
 so charming; and decided it was because, 

on a day like this, 

she came nearer than usual to losing her sense of separate identity.

Extremes of heat and cold she enjoyed too, 

but it was with a tense, belligerent enjoyment.

When they beat against the irregular frontiers of the skin, 

with all its weak angles and vulnerable salients, 

they made her acutely conscious of her own boundaries in space.

Here, she would find herself thinking, 

is where I end and the outside world begins.

It was exciting, but divisive: it made for loneliness.

But on certain days, and this was one of them,

the barriers were down.

She felt as though she and the outside world 

could mingle and interpenetrate;

as though she was not entirely contained in her own body 

but was part also of every other person on the street;

and, for that matter, of the thrush singing on a tree in Eaton Square,

the roan dray-horse straining to take up the load at Grosvenor Place,

the cat stepping delicately across Buckingham Palace Road.

This was the real meaning of peace - not mere absence of division,

but an active consciousness of unity,

of being one of the mountain peak islands on a submerged continent.

from Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther.

Pictures from my walk in the park today.

Upturned faces

Promises

Paperwhite narcissi

planted up over pebbles

in glass containers.

The packet promises perfumed

flowers in profusion in six weeks.