Weekend gardening

Finally Spring has arrived! I've managed to spend a few hours each weekend in the garden and as it is now light when I come home after work I can get a few jobs done when I get home too. I love coming home to my garden, I can literally feel my shoulders drop and un-knot as I open the dining room door and crunch along the gravel. It's always exciting to see what has happened while I've been at work, I like the think of the small white fibrous roots slowly pushing their way through the earth and the little green shoots gradually working their way through the top soil while I'm tapping away on my keyboard at work.

I've already got quite a few projects on the go, I was seduced into buying a few globe thistle tubers from B&Q while I was collecting compost a few weeks ago and I also couldn't pass up a bare-root Sarah Bernhardt Peony for £3. We'll see if my bargains deliver their glossy promises later on this year.

I'm really pleased with my little trooper of a plant, Erysimum 'Bowles's Mauve' a lovely bushy perennial wallflower. Last year it was skeletal after being dug up and transplanted into a pot for the building work, it literally looked like a tumble weed! So I cut it back and kept my fingers crossed, but I have to say I expected it to be off the compost heap, but it rallied and now looks better than ever and even had buds in November. I took some cuttings last year which are all doing marvellously as well so hopefully soon I'll have a little battalion!

At the end of last year I placed an order with dahlia specialists Rose Cottage Plants and then forgot about it and placed another order in February. So I had a bumper delivery arrive at the beginning of March! I went for a mix of Offshore Dream, Wizard of Oz and Myama Fubuki. They don't look like much just now, but I'm looking forward to being able to cut armfuls of flowers for the house with this lot and the Cafe au Lait dahlias that I have brought out of the shed from over-wintering.