Tag Archives: Crocuses

Not Quite Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Crocuses

Posted on by
25

One day I will leave the Priory for ever.  My fingers will be prised one-by-one from the greenhouse door frame and I will be dragged, yowling and shrieking, to a waiting white van.  And on that day, I would like to think that one of my legacies to the gardens, will be the sheer number of spring bulbs.  As well as thousands of daffodils …

The very first daffodil in the garden, February Gold appeared on 1st March. Tut.

… I have planted hundreds of snowdrops …

… and have ordered a further 400, to dot about and to continue this line along one of the outbuildings:

I’ve put in a few dozen cyclamen corms, as there were none …

… and several hundred crocuses as, again, there weren’t any when I started.

Ruby Giant (thankfully I made a crocus map when I planted them all)

There are eleven different varieties but I’m afraid I haven’t got photos of them all.

Ard Schenk

Some have been in since autumn 2008 and are beginning to spread.

Whitewell Purple - here looking decidedly blue

Some are targeted by squirrels and faltering in their conquest of the gardens.

Barr's Purple

They are ephemeral certainly and gone all too quickly. So get down on your knees, get up close and make the most of them.

Firefly emerging

Eventually, I would like the bank below the greenhouse to be smothered in crocuses.

Firefly in flower, right, with Snowbunting

Though they will always deserve individual attention.

Prins Claus

Arguably, my favourite is this:

Pickwick

A big, fat flower …

… whose stripey, plump form puts me in mind of a waistcoat; stretched tight over Mr P’s rotund stomach.

Bulbs aside, and also flowering now, is Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Arnold Promise.’  I bought this three-foot shrub for a fiver!  I was very pleased with myself.  The scent is heady and makes me swoon.

The subtle, little flowers of Cornus mas are also out.

Cornus mas - wrongly identified by me originally as "hoary old willow' - it flowered and my good friend Andrew put me right

But some colour in the garden isn’t at all subtle and has nothing at all to do with flowers:

A refugee from the recent pheasant shooting season, he sought (and was granted) sanctuary in the gardens

Thanks to Stacy who’s recent post, prompted me to join in.  You can too!

Freeloading Ne’er-do-wells

Posted on by
8

A third wave of crocuses (Pickwick) are now showing off.

A stouter plumper crocus this, befitting it’s name
Gosh.  What’s that?  On that tree?  Looks like a well made nestbox.  Rustic and yet chic.

The flurry of comments on my recent auricula post was such that I feel obliged to post another picture of this very popular (with me) plant.  This is a species auricula, Auricula alpina.

Being an idiot can be frustrating and tiresome.  Yesterday, having returned to the Priory after the weekend, I skipped up the path to the greenhouse.  I was looking forward to seeing how my seedlings were doing.  Tomatoes – germinated and looking good; tick.  Aubergines – germinated and looking good; tick.  My half tray of white foxglove seedlings?  Ah.  These had been coming along famously.  Loads of tiny little  cute plants.  Very pleased with them.  But in a moment of idiocy on Friday, I had plonked them down on the floor right next to the greenhouse heater.  When I inspected them yesterday morning, they were all burnt to a crisp. Grrrrrrr.  Deep breaths.  Relax.  Re-sow.
I’ve just baked to death dozens of baby foxgloves.
I had to start moving some plants out of the greenhouse into the cold frame.  The heat that the tomatoes and aubergines crave is also bringing on my rather large (anorak) collection of rhodohypoxis far too early.  I have, what? 80 rhodohypoxis plants and about 15 or so varieties.  Why do I have so many?  Don’t know.  What am I going to do with them all?  Don’t know.  Shouldn’t I get rid of some?  Don’t know.  Anyway, they certainly shouldn’t be getting ready to flower in February – so out they went.
And as I moved them out I found interlopers. Uninvited and unwelcome house guests.  Hiding in amongst the trays and pots – newts!  Can you believe it?  Creeping into my greenhouse, using up all the heat.  Probably  turning up the heater a notch or two.  Without so much as a by my leave.  Half a dozen or more.  Newts!
OK, OK – perhaps they’re not that unwelcome after all
It slowed down the rhodohypoxis evacuation operation considerably;  I was now having to avoid  newt squishing. I’ve set up a new newt-social-centre (upside down seed tray) under the bench in the corner of the greenhouse.  Here they can do whatever it is that newts get up to during the winter.  Drink tequila, tell lewd jokes, choir practice.  Not getting squashed.
Tsk.  The state of my hands.  Really must moisturise more
Found this very young fella out in the cold frame, so upgraded him to the greenhouse with his pals. Just too big hearted that’s my problem.
Really pleased to see that the frogs look like having another  bumper year.  They obviously had a busy weekend:

Tapioca pudding
It does mean though that I’ll have hundreds of froglets under my feet again next summer.  I love frogs.  Always have.  When I was a kid, I used to raise them from spawn to froglets in a tank.  I would tie  lengths of cotton  to earthworms and lower them into the morass of wriggling, voracious, sharp toothed (yeah, really) tadpoles.  Poor earthworms.  Like you or I being lowered alive into a tank of piranhas.  What the tads didn’t eat, I could haul out using the cotton thread so that it wouldn’t decompose and foul the water.  Goodness only knows where I learnt all this stuff from.   ‘Look and Learn’ probably.  When the tadpoles had grown all four legs and  absorbed their tails, I would cycle out to remote ponds in the Hertfordshire countryside and release them.  We knew how to have fun in the 70′s.
Mowing, strimming and the edging of all the lawns is slowed down considerably during the summer by having to ferry young frogs and toads out of harm’s way.  Thankfully I have neither mowed over or strimmed an amphibian yet.  I fear though it’s only a matter of time.  There are so many at the Priory.
Also in residence in the garden is a big old grass snake.  Biggest I’ve ever seen.  Over two foot, I’d say.  It lives in a hole under one of the oaks over on the east pond.  I saw it swimming across the pond a couple of times last year.  As did my terrier, Solo (her real name).  She was furious at it  (for reasons only a terrier would understand) and circled the pond trying to bite it.  Given that the snake seemed almost big enough to swallow her whole, I thought it prudent to lock Solo in the car.
Solo -  supervising the East Pond.  Spring 2009.
I once came across the snake basking in the sun with three or four large intermittent bulges down it’s length.  Presumably stuffed itself on my lovely frogs and was now overfull and groaning and moaning and trying to sleep them off.  Hope it got indigestion.

Perks Must Be About It.

Posted on by
Reply

Blimey.  A spot of sunshine, a few crocuses showing off (like this one)

 

and suddenly it feels like the race is on and I’m still behind the bike shed having a smoke.   Must get on.  Or as Bernard Cribbens in ‘The Railway Children’ would have it, “Perks must be about it.”  Seeds to sow, young oak trees still to transplant and a couple of trees to fell, a little more pruning to complete, a bit of herbaceous digging up and re-siting, an ancient dogwood to tame and loads more scratching my chin whilst doing hard thinking.  The latter is especially difficult.  Not panicking though.  “Eeek!”  Well, a little bit.
I generally don’t do hard thinking.  Gives me nosebleeds.

My latest seed order has arrived, so what with that and that which lies within my special magical boxes, I possess mysteries and treasures of which you can but dream.

An innocuous looking black box (excellent book by the way)
But open it and ooooh,  ahhhhh such potential prettiness
I’ve already sown some seeds.  Four plug trays of a wildflower mix.  I won’t bother potting these on; just plant straight out into in the meadow when they’re big enough.
I’ve also sown white foxgloves into a seed tray.  These will be pricked out and potted on in time.  Tomatoes and aubergines are done and in the next few days, I will sow chilli and sweet peppers too.  The latter, which I’d never grown before, were a great success last year as were the aubergines, again a first for me.  The chilli’s however were a great disappointment.  They were a variety called Hot Portugal but weren’t.  No heat at all.  (Though they possibly did come from Portugal).  Rubbish.  So I shall try another variety this year called Fiesta.  (Needless to say that the greenhouse is heated).
I’ve also sown all the remaining seeds I had of Echinacea paradoxa.  I grew perhaps a dozen of these last year having been smitten by the photo in the seed catalogue.  They didn’t flower but (after a stern talking to), I’m sure they’re going to put on a good show this year.
The Priory is going a little tropical this year (hoorah), hence the cannas and ginger lily in the photo.  I shall use my own (personal) collection of dahlias and bananas too.  The only problem is I haven’t yet decided where this pocket of lush, Amazonia is going to be ……. Exciting though, huh?

I liked that trick with the opening of the seed box so ……

Bit of a hint with this box
These are my veg seeds.  OK,  OK – enough with the seed boxes now.

Misty Springy Warmy Sunshine

Posted on by
Reply

Beautiful but slightly eerie mist greeted my arrival at work this morning.

I normally have a handful of chores to carry out on arrival but this morning the first thing I did was to grab my camera.  The reflections in the pond were screaming out for attention.

Last year, after I had finished building the compost bins I used the leftover scrap wood (and some old roofing tiles) to make five nestboxes; four for tits and one for robins/flycatchers.  Only two of the former were used and due to rubbish siting, the latter was sneered at by the resident robin population.  I did though put them up fairly late (about February) so I am hoping for a better take up rate this year.  I’ve moved the robin box to a very up and coming area (trendy, lots going on), so they should be queuing around the block this year.

During last summer, whilst a pair of blue tits were raising a second brood, a grey squirrel gnawed into the box and ate the young. Nasty, foulbreathed, twitchy-nosed miscreant.   I have heard similar stories before but never experienced it.  A few year’s ago my Dad-in-Law, took great delight in watching a clutch of wrens being raised in a nest box on his garden shed.  That is, until a magpie raided it and ate all the babies.  So today, having made a new  (fifth) tit box, I fitted them all with steel plates that guard against squirrels, magpies etc enlarging the hole and chowing down on the young.

They’re a little rough and ready, or as I prefer to call them – Rustic Chic.

By the time I’d finished faffing about with the boxes, fixed a broken fingernail and reapplied my lippy, the sun had burnt away the mist and it was a perfect spring (only in February) morning.

 
The west pond.  You can make out the greenhouse through the trees

I finished off hacking back and tying in the large climbing roses (abandoned in a bloody huff a few days ago) on the rose tunnel and it was pretty much time to pack up for the day.

Really chuffed that the crocuses I planted in autumn 2008 are flowering and increasing in number.  This is just one variety (Firefly) planted on this slope.  There are another four – all with slightly differing flowering times. Last autumn I planted a further seven varieties in various other parts of the garden.