March in the garden

Just before the clocks change, the garden goes into a kind of overdrive pastel twilight mode, with some plants refusing to be open unless there is sun on them, others fading or shredding in the spring weather-tumble, and lots looking down, into the safe and welcoming ground:





We've only had a few daffodils this year; I may need to replant. But that flowering currant is doing well, considering it came in as a twig gently removed from a municipal bush. There's definitely a main attraction at this time of year, though:



FORSYTHIAAAAAAAA

expanding space of order

Alas my poor growhouse. Storm Gareth did for it:



Still, you have to be phlegmatic about things like this, and what was a flyaway growhouse recycled well enough into a couple of cloches:



These did not blow away during the week, as you can see:



I've finally dug enough that it's starting to feel like I have an expanding area of order:



I also met a second allotment cat, while I was trying to woo allotment cat #1. Allotment cat #1 was just sniffing the hem of my coat when suddenly allotment cat #2 came dashing up, all stares and fury. This one's a slender young tabby, and it chased off the pretty black-and white with a red collar in a trice. I'm hoping I see her again. She reminds me of Harley.

guerrilla gardening at the going-to-be-travelodge

On the far side of the once-lawyers, soon to be travelodge (whose garden I have featured here before) I found an astonishing sight:



It could just be accidental, of course. In a space where every other bit of earth is razed-to-the-ground baresoil, all these narcissi and windflowers and cyclamen could have just come up, having been planted years ago. That happens, right?



That is quite a good stand of windflowers, though. And a really nifty shade of cyclamen. The real clincher, though, and the thing that firmly suggests this is somebody's project, are these:



Somebody has taken the bricks from a backed-into wall and is rebuilding them into wallside planters. It's quite the romantic move, given that garden, building and all is marked for demolition. All the signs you can see in the shot below are security warnings and phone numbers you can call to report an issue with the building. It's under 24 hour surveillance, apparently.



Let's hope nobody destroys it before the tulips come up, because some are pretty clearly on their way. Will they be classic toybox reds? Or, like the delicate narcissi and fancy cyclamen, will they be something a little more classy? Because I have a feeling that this isn't simply a guerrilla gardener, it's an M&S Guerrilla Gardener.

planting the sweet peas

Last year I ordered very fancy sweet peas in precise colours. The week they went out, a heatwave descended, and they all died. So this year I went basic, and just grabbed what seemed about right from a local seed-pusher.



I fancied some bright blue, salmon-orange, white and sky-blue-pink. The best blue was in a multi-pack, so I duly bought the multipack even though Spencer, Old Spice Mixed and Bijou Mixed wouldn't normally make my list. Summer Sizzler, Blue Velvet, Swan Lake and Capel Manor, though, they'll do. Here are the seeds, not as tidy as last year's:



Time for a good soaking now, will they sprout? Here's hoping. Of the leftover home harvested seeds I found in an old spice jar, not one single one germinated. Here's hoping the new ones come through.

allotment "progress"

I'd made a resolution to get up to the allotment every week this year, even if I didn't do very much, but when I got ill mid-Feb that fell apart, and I started to miss weeks. My aim was to dig it, the best I can, and get it dug for planting season. Progress has been slow:



I had too much waste grass to rely on the couch-grass drowning (though that's still happening in the trug above) so I've made turf heaps. They'll be rotten with couch grass, and they're on top of bags of weeds in black plastic bags left behind my my predecessor. They're decayed now, and the weeds have broken out and covered the heaps. I'm covering the lot with wrong-way-up turfs, but I think it'll need something structural to contain the heaps.



I've got beanpoles I've been cutting from the native hedges I planted in friends' gardens - you can see some in the picture below but I have more - and these could shore up the turf heap I think. Also visible in this picture is one of my predecessor's tarpaulins. Above you can see the remnants of a blue one, very decayed, that I still haven't dug up entirely yet. The weeds suppressed them in the end.



The biggest surprise was finding a paving base in the rough long grass at the top of the plot. There was broken glass, so I'm guessing a greenhouse. Tempting to put one back in again. Or maybe this is my shed? There were runs under the waste wood that had been used to level the base, suggestive of furry occupants - but now I've cleared the area, it's going to be a lot less attractive to them.



Next job is to dig up the rest of the grass and start warming the soil. It's a very rough dig so far, too, so a second dig at least. The collapsed grow-house is finding the area too windy. Plastic and wood not cutting it, sadly, and my attempts to pin it with tent pegs or weight it with paving stones fell foul of its sail-like construction. But maybe I could shelter and stabilise it by backing it onto the turf pile?



Next up, hefting up all those random paving stones, rearranging them into weeding tracks across the plot and digging in the ant nests underneath. That'll put structure on the scrubland, at least. The leftover kitchen bits can go in a stack at the back till I figure out how to persuade them into being raised beds, I guess. Lifting the tarpaulin and disposing of the rubbish.



The waste disposal and potting area is a bit nascent, as it stands. The couch grass disposal tube has now been complemented by a weed pile next to it full of dead overgrowth mostly. It'll become some kind of haycock at some point I suppose.



You'd think this couldn't possibly grow food, and mostly you would be right. Horseradish and Sage have pretty much been the sum of my harvest for the last couple of months. But summer is coming, and the plot is clearing, slowly but steadily, and at this time of the year I don't have to feel bad about destroying beautiful wilderness. I can just look over my plot and think: tired, in need of a refresh.

drive-by daffodils

Out in the county, as I sometimes am for work, I found myself taking the A4074 in a rattly, filthy, bumpy bus. The windows were thick with winter dirt, the seats were suggestive of potential infestation, and the bus went fast.

The A4074 on google autocompletes with "bends of death". Twitter veers between "picturesque but mildly depressing" and "avoid avoid avoid". Wikipedia gives the bus schedule and references a sound-art project based there, and shares the accident rate (high). On a windy day in early March, three things jumped in at me, through the murky windows and the spitting rain: roadside shrines, dead badgers and drive-by daffodils. 

The Crazy Frog roadside shrine caught my eye first. Faded to an unsettling, uniform, brownish-yellow, the mass of crazy frog toys and masks stared blank-eyed across a cavernous ditch into the passing traffic. Then I saw a more standard flower-bunch assemblage around a fatal tree. Then a very serious looking, smart and large cross. The road itself is a run of sprints of variable width and overtakeability, between roundabouts, villages and go-slows. The stop-start-lurch combines with sprint-for-the-horizon moments. Farm traffic and caravans trailing trains of impatience. Sudden squeezes alternating with spaces more broad, but not necessarily less dangerous:

Even without the dead badgers, it was very obviously a hard wall for wildlife. Roads were pallisaded with deep ditches and high banks, verges cut low and creased with traffic damage. Here and there a roadside was clearly used as a walkway, officially or otherwise, advisedly or not, dangerously, sometimes, certainly. People, traffic, a wide and dangerous space. Stock-bridges are rare on small roads like this one, so places with lots of cover become unofficial wildlife crossing spaces, and wildlife dies.

The roundabouts are kept low and high visibility. They're of limited value to animals that can't fly, anyway, but native trees have been planted in any case; silver birch to tempt in the woodpeckers and nuthatches of our future, blackthorn to shelter feeding blue-tits. And here and there, the verges are planted with drive-by daffodils. 

Attitudes towards roadside gardening vary, council to council. Some charge for a planting license, others don't. Some adopt a strongly discouraging tone, others are more participatory about it, some take a firm planning-by-professionals-is-necessary-at-all-stages. Oxfordshire's approach looks way too scary to consider for a few daffodil bulbs, so my guess is that any daffs that couldn't be explained away as a spillover from a private residence must have come via town or parish council (though that can also mean an enthusiastic individual pushed it through the council of course). At one time, planting Macmillan Daffodil beds was popular, but not this year - it costs to plant a daffodil bed of course, so maybe it was diverting too much of the funds that would otherwise come to the charity.

Bee-keepers are sniffy about daffodils, too highly bred to be attractive to bees, they say. But bar the rags and triples, I have never grown daffodils without them getting pollinated, so something must like them, and it's not all about the bees.

Vergeside weeds really come into their own a little later in the year, with Cow Parsley, Willowherb, Hogweed and Garlic Mustard, insect platforms of glittering white flowers thick with pollen and nectar, buzzing with hoverflies and crawling with pollen beetles. But at this time of year, the verges are sullen slumps of late-winter sour-grass, covered with a raggedy fuzz of dead brown overgrowth. In the places where primroses and daffodils and celandines stab up through through the grey-green uniformity, it's like a hole punched through to the future that is summer, warm days, air thick with midges and willow-fluff and ringing with birdsong.

Yellow line planting could be given a structure, a species-set. Native Daff, Primrose, Native Celandine, Dandelion, Coltsfoot, Cowslip, Kingcup; there's a YELLOW!!!!! spring flower for every aspect and environment. And while it's true that they move in eventually (some of the best primrose stands I've seen have been on the verges of mature motorways) surely we could help them along a bit, root and bulb and seed and shoot. Just till they're established.

my amaryllis got pollinated!!!

And whatever did the deed must have been in the house, as I didn't open the window it was next to all winter. Could I grow some amaryllis of my own? This was a basic white, with a flush of faint green - cheap but lovely - so if it comes true (and I don't see any way it could have cross-pollinated as I only had one amaryllis this year) we could have a row of them.... and put them, eh, somewhere. Maybe another house entirely. Never mind!



Let's get some propagation tips!!!

• Source 1: Simples! Remove pods as soon as they're yellow, dry the seeds for a few days then plant much as you would anything else.
• Source 2: Time consuming! It takes 2-4 years to progress from seed to blooming plant. (Actually, maybe I count as a patient gardener as that seems pretty good to me?)
• Source 3: Gratifying! And make sure you don't let them go dormant at any stage.
• Source 4: They may even bloom! But maybe check to see if the seeds are viable first?

Hum, OK. Seems straightforward enough. Why not?

what now for the cleared corner garden space

Around our new shopping centre, there's a bit of a feeling coming up off the residential buildings surrounding the Great Work. Are our nettles and overgrown shrubberies still suitable now this has been plonked down next to us, like Starship Commercial City?

In the run of houses next to the new bus-stops the panicked cutting has begun:



A congested municipal shrub has been clear-cut to the ground, revealing the havoc it has wrought on the soil below. Whatever this plant was, it didn't like to share. Here are a couple of context shots to show the shape of the space:



It's not 100% dry, as the algae on the wall attests, but the corner is a touch windswept and bleak. The location is exposed to all the street has to offer, and that heavy congested trunk means that planting anything big will be a struggle. However, I'm pleased to see weeds sprouting already. A bit of Red Valreian, maybe, and the strappy leaves of municipal bulbs. That might be a bit of resprout from the shrub's roots, too. It's not dead, after all - just had its top lopped off.



This tiny unpromising corner might be earmarked for a fancy garden, but I doubt it. I'll check back in as the year advances, but I suspect it's just going to be allowed to grow back, wild as it likes - while the residents enjoy the sun the overgrown shrub was hogging.