March 24th, 2008 Spring Gardening. Or Not!
It started with emptying the winter planters. In truth, only one was emptied. The others are frozen solid.
So, on I moved to the roses. A bit early for cutting them back, but what the heck, why not? Didn’t have to. The rabbits took care it for me.
On to the herb garden. The chives are up and about three inches tall! Yeah, a sign of spring! The thymes and winter savory all survived the winter well and are a lovely shade of green. So nice to see some green for a change. Everything else in the herb garden is still dormant.
Maybe I can do some work in the shrub border? Well would you look at that! Peter (Rabbit) has been at work here as well. Nothing for me here to worry about, so on to the perennial bed.
Still thick with winter mulch, the perennial garden is better left untouched. There’s plenty of cold weather ahead of us apparently. But, the grape hyacinth is up! And Flopsy has pruned The Fairy rose bush for me.
Maybe there was something to work on by the water feature? The ginko biloba seems healthy and untouched. The leaves of the water irises are frozen to the ice in the pond and are not going to give in to my attempts to remove them. Nor is anything else in that garden! I see Mopsy has pruned the Japanese quince. She went a little heavy on the pruning though. It is now four inches high.
How about the shade garden? Surely I can find something to do there! Hmmm. That’s interesting. I don’t remember planting a big plastic ball, but there it is adorning the garden in all its faded primary colour glory, and, full of water to boot! Sorry ball, but primary colours and water are not features intended for this garden. Out you go! The spring anemone is peaking through the soil. It won’t be long before they are in bloom. They are always the first. The soil is too wet to do much in here. Let’s check out the front of the house.
The lavender walk looks as though it has taken quite a beating this winter. There will be lots of work needed on that, but not today. The boxwood, cedar and red twig dogwood all look well. Can’t say the same for the New Dawn rose climbing up the side of the porch. Cottontail must have trimmed this one. There are grape hyacinths coming up. Funny, I thought I dug all of those out? Apparently I missed a dozen or two.
Enough of gardening for one day. There’s still too much snow on the ground anyway. Besides, Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail have already done so much of it.
