It’s great to have soil under your fingers nails again.  It means that Spring is almost here and that the garden needs attention again.

Lythrum in full flower

 

I didn’t really plan to get planting today, but we had a lythrum that had self seeded itself in the “wrong” place and so it had to come out.   Lythrums are very hard plants to get out once you have them and we find that the only practical tool is a pickaxe.  The trouble was that the lythrum had managed to get in the middle of a clump of geraniums, so they had to be lifted to make space for the pickaxe.  Well, the good thing is that it meant that I divided the geranium and had a lot of new young plants to put in other areas of the garden.  There aren’t too many spare bits of ground in my garden even at this time of year, but I managed to find some homes for the new plants.

The plants are really taking off this Spring.  We had snow almost two months earlier than usual this winter and it is as if the plants have taken that as their cue and woken up much earlier than usual.  The red stems of the peonies are looking wonderful and the hemerocalis are growing really strongly.  The aqualegias are growing strongly and the daffodils are out.  The hellebores are looking wonderful this year.  One of my new ones turns out to be a pink speckled double – a real beauty.

Not all in the garden is rosy though – one of my vibernums has suffered very badly from vibernum leaf beetle over the last few years, so I decided that it was for the chop.  The underside of the leaves were badly infested with larvae eggs, and there was little that I could have done to stop the leaves turning to lace in a couple of months.  The good thing is that the shrub was stopping me seeing the true beauty of my Cercidiphyllum (aka Katsura) tree, so now I will really be able to enjoy its beauty and I have a whole new area to plant in my pond garden.