What an exciting week in the garden, though you wouldn’t know it on first inspection.
A drab, cold and grey February week in Kent — quite depressing, to be honest — with apparently nothing going on. But underground...what potential energy is building to a peak! It feels like the garden’s full of little incendiary devices everywhere...waiting to explode.
Already snowdrops and crocuses are livening up the scene across the neighbourhood — in my garden the tulip foliage is forcing its way out of the ground with no little force. Buds are swelling everywhere I look — from the hawthorn in the hedgerows I run past, to the red-stemmed Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’, annoyingly remind me I should have moved it to its planned final location over winter when it was dormant. I know it’s only a few weeks till those dual harbingers of spring in our garden, the snowy mespilus Amelanchier larmarckii and Emma’s Magnolia stellata, are resplendent in their full, fresh white-flowered glory.
And if that wasn’t enough, it’s nearly March, which means...seed time!