Not one of the best days for taking photos of the garden, it’s dull and drizzling, but I got out there for this January 2017 End of Month View ( EOMV).
The garden is very wet and I have done very little in the garden save for filling in holes in the flower beds courtesy of foxes and cats. I have spoilt the aesthetic look of the garden with sticks and chicken wire to try to protect all the bulbs, but sometimes even these don’t thwart the wretched animals.
Taking photographs of the garden is an important way of seeing things differently. The photo above has shown that I need to reshape the border slightly, I think it looks a bit odd. However, although it is a small garden, I think I have proved you can still have an interesting walk around the garden and see things from different perspectives, rather than stand at the top of the garden and view everything at once.
There is a small bed to the left of the back patio which in the last 5 years had raspberry bushes. I am cutting out a lot of them, not only because they produce more raspberries than I can cope with they have taken over a flower bed in a great sunny position. In the summer, after the strawberries finished, I moved them into this bed and they have taken to their new home. I put a cage over them, again to protect them from being dug up. This is another bed full of bulbs, covered with chicken wire. It is my intention to have a small cutting patch here.
Just to finish off the view of the back garden is a photo of the other border which faces north and has very little sun in the summer with none in the winter.
The side patio is full of spring bulbs filled pots with just a few green tips poking through. Looking back they appear to be a little later than usual in past years and there is, disappointingly no sign of the Iris Reticulata. Below is a photo of the very pretty iris from a post on 8 February 2015. You can see from the photo how much further advanced the daffodils were then.
Last year (2016) was different because the tenant planted a tomato plant in the bed under my window, which is her prerogative, but it grew rampantly and unchecked so took over the bed and I was unable to plant any summer flowers, which was a shame. I am wondering if she will do the same again in 2017, I expect she will because despite the dry west facing aspect, clay soil, never watering, or pinching out, she had an excellent crop of cherry tomatoes – very annoying! At the moment, the Day Lillies are producing healthy shoots and the tete-a-tete narcissus are looking as though they have survived the tomato plant onslaught, although there are not as many as previous years.
Finally, I can’t complete a January End of Month View without showing the snowdrops in the front garden. A strange thing has happened though. I always hang bird feeders on the lilac tree, but this year the inevitable drop of seeds have produced grass! This has choked some of the snowdrops and will give me another job to dig over this bed to remove the grass without disturbing the snowdrops.
The EOMV meme is hosted by Helen of The Patient Gardener. Please pop over to her blog as many gardeners across the world contribute to this meme and it is really interesting to see how others are doing at this time of the year.
