March of course is unashamedly yellow. There's lots of daffodils nod, nod, nodding in the breeze, their cheerfulness reassuring us that spring is truly here, even if things might go out with one last wintry roar at the end of the month. Until now, I've always chosen them to showcase March in my garden. However, 2011 already is turning out to be an untypical year: if there is such a thing as typical in the world of gardening.
After the cold of December, January saw my snowdrops blooming far earlier than usual by around 10 days. They're just beginning to go over and now my daffodils are taking their place. But what's this? We have a usurper in our midst: my Forsythia has decided to bloom ahead of its far daintier cousins. This is a first for my garden and is just plain
wrong.
I'm sure it's because I've decided to get rid of it this year, so it's decided to play by the rules of
Houdini Plants I devised a while ago. As you can see it's flowering its socks off in a kind of last hurrah. Until now it's never been a prolific bloomer, usually preferring to proffer an odd twig of gold here and there instead.
Today it's as loud as its far lustier cousins and showing just how garish a Forsythia can be. I bought it because the corner it's planted in is usually dull and I wanted it to brighten the spot. It's also a variegated variety, my reasoning being that this would make it more interesting during the non-flowering period. How wrong I was: a variegated non-flowering Forsythia is just as boring as the more conventional kind. So I'm showing it off today because I've never shown it before and as a final record of how that part of the garden looks before I change it.
In other news I've lost my heart to a Hellebore. This is most strange as I don't usually go for them at all. I get irritated by their downward looking flowers and have had lots of difficulty when growing them in the past with ugly black spots on the foliage. All that changed when I went to the
RHS Show last month and met
Helleborus 'Winter Moonbeam'. I spent a lot of time looking at her whilst
Victoria made her snowdrop selection, but the visions of that black spotted foliage made me determined not to cave in to her charms.
Returning to the Halls late on in the afternoon was a dangerous move as the crowds had gone and there was time to chat at length to the pleasant woman on the
Harveys stand. I explained my previous difficulties with Hellebores which prompted lots of questions about my garden and soil. It appears its previous life as a farm means that the ground is trying to return to a meadow and the clay soil isn't really helping re the fungus responsible for the
black spots. I really need to rework the soil, dig deep and add lots of gravel. There was lots of advice and absolutely no pressure to buy, just a cheery 'well you need to go and do a bit of thinking about what you want to do then'.
Then I spotted one of them in a large pot. 'Oh, can you grow them like that?' I asked. 'Oh yes' came the reply, 'These have been potted up for 3 years. Just give them some bonemeal a couple of times a year and they'll be fine.' That made my mind up and I now have a pair of delightful large flowered Hellebores lighting up the steps down to my shed. I love their marbled foliage too: a double unexpected delight. It just goes to show that perhaps if we dislike a particular plant, it's not really dislike at all but probably because we haven't found the right one yet.
I'll make an exception in the case of the Forsythia though ;)
