Keep Calm and Garden On

Hello Fellow Gardeners. Your media folks are working on making our sites: newsletter, blog and face book, a place where we can all connect while we adopt the "stay at home" plan.  The programme committee will be bringing you something very soon, meanwhile, today, I'm introducing the "garden reports" project. Several members have agreed to report on what is happening in their gardens, greenhouses, potting sheds and windowsills. Think of these posts as something like our social chat at garden club and feel free to chip in with your own reports, pictures, suggestions, questions and funny anecdotes. Many thanks to Diana Watson, who kick started the project, her first report follows.


It's Spring! How do I know? My bulbs are up and after all that black and white and mostly grey I have COLOUR in my garden. It never ceases to amaze me how one can go out to the local nursery,
buy these weird round bulbs that look like they could be served with a meal and, if you bury them in the dirt about October, you produce plants with a marvelous array of shapes and above all gorgeous colour with splashes of brilliant shades .

Yellows, scarlet, indigo, purple, crimson, mauve to say nothing of the striped combinations or the golden ones with red spashes on them. The short ones ( I think they're irises) are a deep purple blue shot through with gold, just so perfect in shape. To see it there is like finding a treasure on the ground. And settled in between all these are whites and pale blues and and delicate mauves, you just know if you touch them that they will be soft.

So far, it is mostly the croci  and the baby irises that have arrived in full bloom but the centre piece of King Alfred's (the daffs) are up at full height and some are open and others are still in bud, but they are very emphatically are stating that Spring has arrived.

Appearing in different areas are the distinctive shapes of tulip plants. they are waiting patiently for less frosty mornings and I have to consult my garden map to find what colour is where. But the promise of more is there in clumps. There will be purple with a fringe and two red bunches and two red and white ones. In between are single daffodils just announcing that they're first as usual but will leave the field to the tulips when hopefully Spring is  more advanced.

Then the garden will show its final hurrah when the Alium bulbs shoot out to their full height and stay with the garden display right into summer. I don't know what colour they are, it's going to be a surprise!