Green at last

It’s still cold at nights, but It must be spring: everybody’s either nesting:

or unfurling:

These  are the emerging leaves of glaucidium palmatum, the Japanese wood poppy. I thought I’d lost it, but I’d just forgotten where I’d put it until  I dug it up by mistake while forking over the iris border behind the ruin. It has yet to flower with me, but these unfolding leaves dragging themselves out of the cold soil into the sun, I find attractive enough to be going on with.

In a late year, such as this one, the altitude I garden at is driven home to me. Down at sea level, people have been mowing their lawns and looking at the blossoming hawthorn. Here, at 600 feet, even the birch trees are not yet in full leaf. But there are the beginnings of colour:

The problem with marsh marigolds, is that they look wonderful at this time of year, but exceedingly ugly once they have finished flowering. I usually cut them right back, and they don’t seem to mind, but it is a task which involves clambering around in the mud. Speaking of which, I contemplate the pond weed with dread. It is time to clamber into the water and haul it out. I keep putting it off, hoping the pond will warm up a bit….but it will have to be done soon. There’s no escape. The older I grow, the less I look forward to it…

The scree garden is coming to life. The late snow and frost has not done anything to improve the shape of the plants, such as silene acaulis, which are supposed to grow into neat cushions. They now look like cushions that several mice and the family dog have played with. But here’s a gem:

Vitaliana primuliflora, an alpine native to the Pyrenees, should cover itself in yellow at this time of year. Mine doesn’t; in fact it has failed to flower for several years. But I read somewhere that it prefers really poor soil, so I dug it out of the nice fertile clay, and gave it pure grit to feed on. And it’s working..

Another rock plant I struggle with is this: androsace primuloides. The androsache family are marginal, at best, in this climate – and even in my scree border, it is too wet (as you can see by the infiltrating moss. But I love its strangely mechanical growth habit: flowers – straight up; new rosettes rigidly out at right angles into each quadrant. I really ought to find  it a dry, gritty slope.  I don’t have one. But I have ideas….

A bit of warmth.

Tonight, the temperature is forecast to drop to 2 degrees. And to reach a high of 7 tomorrow, with thundery showers and a 22mph wind from the south-west. Perfect gardening weather. So, to cheer me (and you) up, here are a few hints of what spring should really be like. I had to go to Andalucia to find them:

I don’t know what the blue flower is. It looked like a kind of Echium, but not so hairy. Are there any Mediterranean experts among readers who can help out? And that’s a fearsome thistle.

If I sow a packet of wild flower seeds, does the result look like this? No.

There is no Scottish equivalent to bougainvillea. Maybe it’s just as well. Too pink. Or too purple. Or both.

There’s something very classy about wrought iron. If I had a proper garden, with proper gates and paths, instead of a cold swamp, I might invest in some. There’s nothing like a good wrought iron gate, complete with your initials, to make the plebians envious as they peer in at your perfect fountain and your nicely spaced pot plants…

A very slow spring

It’s still cold. Nine to eleven degrees, and a chill wind from the north-west. We’re at least four weeks later than last year (which was a disaster anyway, with its vicious late frosts).

As I’ve said before, I’m not unhappy. With everything held back, I’ve got on with a lot of things without the usual rush to clear weeds and mow grass. Turned the compost heap, dug new drains in an effort to make the bog garden less of a swamp, cleaned out the strawberries, manured the raspberries. And re-soiled the blue poppy beds, lifted and split their inhabitants. They are looking much happier than they were last year:

The early primulas are in full flower: Primula rosea enjoys having its roots in running water, but is equally happy in a damp bed.

I’m especially pleased that my primula melanantha survived the winter. I’ve kept it in its pot (I don’t normally like doing this) and sunk it into a fairly shady spot. It spent the months from September to March in the greenhouse, with only a tiny drip of water once a fortnight. Now it’s pushing out its velvety-black flowers.

On the subject of black, about five years ago, I stuck a black hellebore (helleborus niger) into the remains of a rotten tree stump under beech trees. The odd leaf appeared, but little else, and I wrote it off as a stupid error. But, lo and behold, the Christmas rose, flowering in May!

The not a tulip show

On the outskirts of Brussels, there’s a seventeenth-century castle made of brick and spiky things, where each year Dutch and Belgian growers show off their tulip collections.

I’m not a great fan of tulips laid out in beds according to variety. But tulips, after the breeders have had their way with them, can be weird and wonderful things, especially parrot tulips, so I went along. But this year has been so cold, there wasn’t a tulip to be seen. Actually, there was one, flowering all on its own: tulipa fosteriana ‘Pirand’. And that was it.

Instead of the tulips, the earlier spring bulbs, which should have been over, were in full flower under the trees. I think I prefer them to tulips. There were some clever colour combinations.

But what I found most interesting was that the bulbs were growing through a few of inches of coarse sand. I imagine this is because the sand warms faster than the cold clay beneath and encourages the bulb into growth. I must try it in my own inhospitable climate.

To make up for not having any tulips to look at, everyone packed into the covered display area, where there were some truly bizarre things to be seen. Someone had wasted packets of dye and endless time,  to produce this:

The ‘Rainbow rose’. Not fabric. I wish it had been. I could indulge in a little rant here about squandered human ingenuity. But I won’t;  I’ll pass on to another monstrosity, which is what happens when plant breeders get so carried away by their own genius, that they entirely forget about aesthetics. Would you really want this apology for a daffodill leering at you from your flowerbeds?

An alpine spring

A couple of posts ago, I wrote that snow in March never lasts long. I was wrong. Slowly, slowly, it is now starting to melt, but is still a foot or so deep in the shady parts of the garden where it drifted in the strong easterly wind.

Where the daffodils break through the snow, the sun-warmed air reaches into the hole they have made and melts the snow round each plant. Spiky bulb leaves do this, but flatter slow growing plants, such as cushion saxifrages, must wait. My scree bed lies under a cold blanket, except where a rabbit has passed – the sun widening out its tracks, so that it looks as if a gigantic Easter bunny has visited.

Since I constantly moan about warm, wet, winters and premature warmth in March, I’m actually happy with all this. It’s exactly what alpine plants need. Of course it is frustrating not to be barrowing compost and splitting blue poppy plants and all the other jobs that are now queuing up, but because of the cold and the snow, it’s less likely that May frosts will wipe out all the young growth, as happened last year.

And, where the snow melts, the early primulas rush into flower. Here is p.sonchifolia, breaking out of its resting bud and eagerly putting out its blooms before bothering to grow a stem. As you see, the leaves have suffered badly from frost. It’s an irony that many high-altitude primulas can be easily frost-damaged – the snow cover in their native mountains normally keeps them safe. Unfortunately, in Scotland the snow melted before the frosts were past. Such is life.

From here to Chelsea…

This morning, this was the state of the bed where I grow most of my Primula Inverewe:

A few weeks ago, I had an e-mail from Stella Rankin at Kevock,  asking for as many Inverewe as I could provide, since she had agreed to supply Nigel Dunnett for his show garden at Chelsea this year. The new growth on the primulas was scarcely through the ground at the time, but during the brief spell of dry weather we had, I managed to lift and split every clump here, and came up with 150 offshoots. Luckily, p.Inverewe clumps can be disentangled easily, unlike other of the candelabra tribe. I stuck the offshoots into liquid mud in groups of ten. Then the snow descended….

Picking the primulas back out of the icy mud was not a task to relish. But if they are going to be in flower for Chelsea, they are going to need warmth, and love. And they are not going to get much of either in the frozen wastes of Central Scotland. So I rushed them into Kevock, much as one rushes an urgent bag of blood plasma.

It takes a certain professional ability to see from the present to the future to be thrilled by a box of icy mud with a few green leaves sticking out of it. But Stella rose to occasion, and I got a hug for my pains.

Professional nurseries are bleak places in winter. Odd to think that in a few months, all these bare tables will be covered with flowering plants ready to be despatched southwards to London to give the crowds something to gasp at.  Personally, I’ll sit back and admire my primulas on the TV  at the Gardeners’ world Chelsea special. They look better in a proper garden, anyway.