Watering as the soil is dry, carrots through, tree peony and lilacs in flower and got up today (Sunday) to a cuckoo calling and house martins whizzing past the window. Having said that there are very few martins and swallows around. The may blossom is just coming out (late), there are blue camasses in the grass on the top banking and the first oriental poppy.
However the hebe looks moribund and the eucryphia is very tattered and its leaves browned and sparse. We have lost all the rosemarys except the one big one outside the kitchen.
We are enjoying the asparagus and R has hand weeded the bed - the only way. The new plants are alive and sending up their first thin shoots.
The forget me nots are everywhere, in between the paving slabs, in the flowerbeds and up in the wood - lovely, mm, not sure about between the slabs.
And then there is a lot of yellow after the daffodils -
the genista,
the azalea - on the left the one I deadheaded last year full of scented flowers and on the right the one I did not. So guess what I will be doing later this year.
The tree peony on the banking is flowering as is the Viburnum plicatum "Mariesii". The two do not really go together. The peony is a cutting from a plant my mother had and this has been passed around the family. Even though she died nearly eighteen years ago we take a bit of her memory with us when we move house.
There are some oranges too like Welsh poppies - the orange seems to be out-breeding and -seeding the yellow, the Euphorbia by the shed and even orange tip butterflies on the Garlic Mustard (Jack-by-the-hedge) in the wood.
It is always satisfying when something tried comes off - planting the copper beech behind the white birches accentuates the whiteness of their trunks.The younger trees are just beginning to turn white.
And by Thursday the hawthorn trees are laden with blossom like snow carpeting their branches.
When we were up in Scotland the gorse was magnificent in blasts of yellow with its heavy honey scent.
The trouble with this time of year is that there is so much to say - I have not mentioned taking out the tulips from the pots now that they are done and laying them in trays in the shed to dry off for next year. We are hoping to replace them with Erysimum Bowles Mauve but I have chanced my arm and stuck some rather small white agapanthus in for now.
The weather continues dry and hot - not like north west England at all.
I have an azalea rooted from a piece from my mom. We have only lived in 2 houses but I have had it with me at both.
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