What's Flowering In My Garden Now - Even After All That Rain

Hi there and welcome to the February or late winter garden tour which is just a little trip around the garden with me and my mobile phone and it's today because today is the first day for a long time that it hasn't rained. The British climate is considered to be rainy but it really isn't. Our average rainfall here in the southeast of England is pretty much the same as Melbourne in Australia which is definitely not a rainy place. However we do seem to have very irregular rainfall and we have something like six to nine week droughts in the summer quite regularly these days and such wet winters. We actually had a hosepipe ban until two weeks ago if you can imagine and yet it was raining every day. In terms of the temperature our winters are generally quite mild and we rarely go below minus six celsius 21 fahrenheit but this winter we've had very few frosts maybe half a dozen and most of the time the temperatures have been just a few degrees above freezing but it has rained and of course there are a lot of plants that can cope with the cold but not if their roots are sitting in soggy wet wet soil. So let's see now here I'm starting here this time because it's such a joy to see the snowdrops. The UK is the major country for snowdrops I think we have something like about 80 percent of all the snowdrops in the world. Of course outside the house we have a terrace which looks as all terraces do in late winter. A dead Christmas tree waiting to be chopped up, things at an angle, piles of wood. Let's move on it's not very beautiful. So we go up these steps and on to what we call the parterre. On this left hand side is a north facing wall it's got a wall it's got trees it's very shady the main thing we've done to create a bit more light is to raise the canopy of the trees to cut one tree down and grew up again it became multi-stemmed we cut it down it became even more multi-stemmed it's quite nice now actually and we've taken its lower branches out and then this other tree which is a conifer we have simply raised the canopy quite high. Things looking pretty in the shade in late winter include these lovely sickleman leaves as well as this which is lamium a dead nettle and these just self-seed themselves around the garden and I think they really are very pretty. In September those sickleman will be little white flowers and they're also a few snow drops this is right directly under the canopy of the fir tree so there's very little light but a few snow drops are surviving and as I say the sickleman and the lamium are very happy. Between the lower lawn and the upper lawn there's a set of steps and on the right hand side of the parterre we have the main sunny border which is really where I try to put most of my color we can see it from the kitchen window it's really where most of the serious gardening insofar as I do serious gardening goes so let's have a look at this. I had left most of the grasses and seed heads over the winter and we've been cutting them down for example that's nepeta as soon as the little green leaves started to appear underneath I asked Felix to cut that right down Felix helps me in the garden there is quite a lot of self-seeded euphorbia I'm not cutting the grasses down yet but I think that that will come in the next week or so I've still kept these long tall spikes of verbascum because I love them but quite frankly they should go pretty soon self-seeded primroses and also violets here is a clump of chrysanthemum burnt orange and as you can see it's trying to take over the world I think next year we'll probably dig a few clumps up and maybe give them away because it is a lovely lovely flower and it's the last one to flower at the end of the year further down here that is the beginnings of the sedum or rather the hylotelephium coming up we cut those seed heads back once we can see the green underneath and the flower I'm most keen on at this time of year is the summer snowflake or is wonderful against the bark of a silver birch and it flowers quite early it's one of the first things to come out around the time the snow drops come out and the flowers are often still there in April a couple of months later one of the joys of this time of year is the areas under deciduous trees deciduous trees are trees that drop their leaves in autumn and they usually don't get that leaf canopy back until quite late in spring sometimes early summer and what that means is that plants that need sunlight in the winter and early spring really flourish so you can see here snow drops leucogium there are more of the cyclamen and there's an awful lot of self-seeded Smyrnium porfoliatum or porfoliate alexanders now this is invasive in the countryside in Britain I've had it since before it was defined as invasive but also I live in a town and there are a lot of streets and houses and places where Smyrnium won't grow before you get to the countryside we've also got as a self-seeder this syrinthe which has lovely blue flowers once again very long lasting it'll come out in flower in about two or three weeks time and that'll go on for a couple of months here used to be the veg patch I've been growing wildflowers there for a couple of years I'm now going to turn this into a wildlife cottage garden so I'm slowly planting wildlife friendly plants in clumps Felix has thinned out the wildflowers we are leaving some of them in some teasels some oxeye daisies and also some wild carrot and possibly a few other things and Ozzy is just investigating yep nothing there for dogs and I've added some bronze fennel and some jekka's thyme and a few other things and I'll be adding in probably a few dozen more plants into each border it costs quite a lot to fill up a border so that's why we're leaving quite a lot of the wildflowers in so that we don't have to fill the entire border and of course you know more mess over there here we've got a little clump of self-seeded it's the smirning profoliatum it's a pulmonary or lungwort this is litmus coronaria or red campion and they're beautiful pink flowers which last quite a long time in the summer and once again that's self-seeded so it's a good one to have around Ozzy's sniffing around to see if there's anything of interest to dogs here I've got a great big rosemary bush which is basically here for cooking rosemary and it's never really flowered before but I'm very hopeful that this year is the year that I'll have a lovely stems of blue flowers because rosemary is really pretty when it flowers and once again it's another early flower it's good for pollinators this is our habitat pile it looks a mess but I'm quite sure that the insects and wildlife love it and it's all the stuff we can't really get into the compost heap I hoped we could create something beautiful like they have at Great Dixter but actually this will just have to do and of course in summer we won't notice it because the leaves will be on the bushes here's another corner that actually looks better at this time of year than it does later on it's another shady one it's got trees which lose their leaves so it's sunnier now and a high wall and what's doing particularly well is the lycogeum again and just coming out there is some Jack Frost Brunnera I would love it to be a bit more aggressive everyone thinks it goes everywhere but it hasn't here this beautiful hellebore is Eric Smithii moonshine I think now this is the danger of buying one pretty plant I should have bought about five and it would be a lovely big clump and every year I keep meaning to add to it and every year I forget but it would be lovely to see more than just one flower there really once again you can see the cyclamen leaves colonizing around the base of the trunk and we still haven't cut down our seed heads on the floamiss because they're still creating some sort of upright interest but pretty soon those will have to go there's a self-seeded verbascum and I do love their tall spires so if it's chosen to be here which is a shady place this is epimedium now whenever I go to other gardens I see great clumps of epimedium amber queen with its beautiful yellow flowers so I plant a clump and it just doesn't do as well here this is the last attempt I planted three only two survived only one looks healthy if it really doesn't like it I'll have to give up more wasmernium perfoliatum you can see why it's called invasive coming along here the hydrangeas look just like sticks but I was given a tip said you can check whether something's alive by just scraping it with your fingernail and can you see I think in a past time we would have got rid of the moss on these bricks and certainly the moss on this bench the bench is very old boss is not doing it any good and it is going to fall apart fairly soon but it is old enough that I'm actually happier with the moss and bench moss and fungi are becoming an increasingly important part of the garden or rather they always were a very important part of the garden but we all tried to get rid of them but now people are realizing that just as you need good gut biome you also need moss and fungi in your gardens to make sure that everything's working properly it's all part of the cycle of life in this corner we've got the bird feeder really near to some evergreen hedging some rose which keeps its leaves and a couple of trees and quite a lot of growth now the thing is about bird feeders is that birds are prey and they can't really fly to a feeder if you put your feeder in the middle of the garden and they've got to fly too far in an open space it makes them very vulnerable and they won't do it so you need to have bird feeders quite close to a bit of shelter so they can run out grab something to eat and then fly back again euphorbia wolfenii where would we be without it at this time of year once again it's a thug you can see how it's spreading all we really ever have to do to it is dig it up if it's gone somewhere we don't want it but it just is so uplifting at this time of year this is comfrey it spreads like mad but you can just pull it out and put it into the compost bin and the wildlife absolutely love it once again it's got early flowers for emerging pollinators and it's actually taken over a bed where we did have ground elder we got rid of the ground elder we planted the comfrey and actually i'd rather have the country than the ground elder because the country's so useful for wildlife and for the compost heap this is a temporary border which will only last until about mid-summer but before mid-summer and it's a series of white bulbs which i've planted snowdrops crocuses and several different kinds of daffodil which go on flowering in succession until late spring and then i'll have to leave the grass long and not mow it in this area until about mid-summer when all the leaves have died back and then the flowers will be back next year so it is literally the only care these bulbs need is for you not to mow that particular area until about mid-summer and they're all good spreaders apparently well i chose them to be white and all good spreaders as always goes with gardening i can see a yellow one there but you know never mind it's a very pretty yellow now those twiggy things you can just about see in amongst the bulbs are salvias i have never yet got a salvia through the winter but most people do now one of the things i had been doing was cutting these twiggy things back before you could see the green growth coming up from the base and a salvia expert told me you do need to leave the twigs on salvia until you can see the new growth obviously if you've got a really big garden then leaving twigs on until you see the new growth is going to be too time consuming but it does seem a sensible thing to do anyway fingers crossed for the salvia but i don't have any great hopes because we've had such a wet spring so let me know how your spring is and thank you for watching goodbye