“There are moments in the gardening year when, like Cecil B. de Mille, you want to shout Hold it and freeze the scene, just as it is in every detail, for a little longer.”
Anna Pavord (The Curious Gardener)
My Cecil B. de Mille moment came right before Easter weekend when the snow crocus and snowdrops were in their full glory. The crocuses were open in the afternoon sun and they were on week three of blooming. They were definitely ready for their close up and I wanted them to just stay like that for another week. Which would be greedy, of course. They had already been putting on a show for ages.
I know that we are all tired of the word unprecedented but three weeks of crocus blooming is unprecedented. In years when spring gets too hot too quickly, they barely last a week. We are so used to spring instantly turning hot that we have forgotten that these little bulbs can last for weeks if conditions are right.
I had two groupings of the beautiful little iris reticulata last for a couple of weeks. Just like the crocus, these don’t last for very long in the heat so it was great to have them for longer this year.
Hellebores have also been beautiful this year in the long, cool spring. I was never that keen on the hellebores; I think because I had only ever seen them planted as single specimen plants. This year I saw hellebores with green cup shaped flowers planted in drifts in a woodland garden. There were some snowdrops mixed in and it made an absolutely glorious spring display.
Snow peas and spinach were planted at the end of March. I don’t think I even bothered with spinach last year as it warmed up too quickly. My experience with spinach has been that even the supposed bolt resistant varieties really don’t do well in the heat.
I also, for the first time in years, planted sweet peas. This was partly because of the cold weather which sweet peas love and partly because I found a bunch of already cut hazel in the woodshed.
It was easy and it didn’t take long to make a support for the sweet peas. Taking inspiration from a photo in an English magazine, I put the hazel in the ground as uprights and held it together with three grapevine coils. You don’t have to go very far to find a whole lot of grapevine around here.
The resident cats were very helpful with this construction. They chased the long pieces of grapevine before I could get them wound around the hazel sticks. And they climbed up on it before it was finished. I hope they will have lost interest in it by the time the sweet peas come up.
Hazel is a great material for making trellises and other garden structures. But I will issue a caution about planting it inside a garden. It’s a suckering monster and I really wish someone had told me to put it out in the field. It rarely produces actual hazel nuts because it rarely gets pollinated in this part of the world. The few times it has actually produced hazelnuts, each one had a small hole in it that told me that some insect had gotten there first.
I originally had three hazels and one died which didn’t bother me at all. Two suckering monsters is quite enough thank you very much. The remaining two provide enough building material to make as many trellises as anyone could ever hope to make.
Crocuses and snowdrops will be done soon and daffodils are already in bud. I hope the cooler weather holds on for awhile so that the daffodils will last for a long time, too.
Happy spring everyone.
by Jill Williams
