first of the year

So, during the processes of Christmas I have ended up with a delightful and somewhat significant garden-related loot pile. Here's what they are, and what the plans are:

• RHS Practicals Fuchsias - bought from the Oxfam bookshop while I was looking out obscure children's fiction for my neiblings. For me. As I think fuchsias will be "my plant" - they have the flamboyance of begonias combined with the mutability of chrysanthemums (two other favorites) plus a massive side-helping of weird. They're also woody plants, and what can I say, I like wood.
• Galvanised Orange watering can - thanks Sis! It's going up to the allotment, once I've painted "DAY" on it roughly in red paint. As the allotment's call must needs be answered.
• Mini plant snips - in my stocking this year! The pot plant situation is already improving, but needs to be taken better in hand in 2019 as we entering the mature phase of the household planting. 
• Air plant baubles - mine were a T&M Xmas special, now de-linked and invisible, so the first thing I had to do was pull the air plants off their spikes..... but hanging plants about the house must now needs be activated. I'm all out of surface. 
• Some interesting seeds - I'm growing Amaranth and Vegetable Mallow on the allotment this year, from the looks of it. Woo-hoo!
• Fritillaria Persica - the gothest of bulbs. I need to go bulb crazy this weekend and get them all down, as there are more bulbs.
• Exochorda Macrantha - a sparkly white shrub, which will complete the changeover of the back of the deep bed into interesting shrub space/hedgehog and cat run.
• The Unofficial Countryside - in Owen Hatherley's introduction, he describes this as JG Ballard's Crash, re-envisioned as a nature book. I'm really enjoying it, though Hatherley is full of shit, as always. Though I do kind of know what he means. But yes, let's re-read Mabey. He after all provided one of my key garden quotes, which I will say to this day when I try something of marginal edibility (hmmm, Vegetable Marrow, I am looking at you). "Tolerable, when steamed as spinach" - his standard, one-line entry next to any plants that wouldn't actively poison you in his very, very, very famous book "Food for Free." Weeds, ethnobotany, urban wildlife and crows are also in the reading pile, suggesting that the allotment also needs a reading nook.
• Succulents Calendar - this contains vintage illustrations of succulents, not the modern kind. This old style of plant illustration is interesting me at the moment - its turgid, diagrammatic disregard of perspective and setting is appealing and muddling in my mind with the kind of 80s flat-style ceramic and kitchen look. I might be experimenting with that, and seeing where the collision takes me. 

So, there's my job-list for 2019. Fuchsias, wastelands, pot plants, ink experiments and pointless vegetables. I'm galvanized, and so is my water can. Let's get this year in the ground!