Another frosty morning but at last all the roses on the wall have all been pruned. It has been slow work with a week of snow on the ground and at least another week of rain. 
There are a few roses that still need sorting out. A bit late but I am sure they will survive. 
The weather certainly resulted in an early finish for the snowdrops which were looking great. In the last week the sun has come out and the temperature is more back to normal, around at 11c. With the extra temperature you could almost see the garden bursting into live. This bed should be full of tulips in a few weeks and it is great to see flower buds coming through as well as leaves.
One big job that has been completed is the annual cut of the pleached lime hedge, Tila platyphyllos rubra. See Creating and maintaining a pleached lime hedge
The Indian limestone paving by the house was put down about twenty years ago and has started to move losing much of the grout.
This is in the process of being lifted and re-bedded and re-grouted.
It should be finished in another week.
I am not a big fan of daffodils. They look great when they are out but the leaves do hang around for a long time after flowering. The solution I have used to good effect is to plant them around the boundary of the garden which is effectively the back of the beds. The leaves can then be left as other plants grow up in front of them.
Iris Histrioides Katherine Hodgkin has been a success elsewhere in the garden. At the end of last year I planted them through the Stone edged circle bed. I was concerned that the squirrels had been having dinner on the bulbs as last month there was no sign of them. However, they are now out and looking great. Over time I hope they will multiply and form a snake through the bed.
This little gem flowered for the first time this year. This is Erythronium Snowflake and they were planted in 2015. A long wait but worth it so I may be tempted to buy some more!
Another good doer is the corkscrew hazel, Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’, which always has a good display of catkins.
| 2018 Gardening Hours | ||
| Week beginning March 24th | Total 2018 to-date | Average per week |
| 36 | 160 | 13 |
A busy week and the average is beginning to grow towards last years average of 20 hours a week.
Do have a look at Helen The Patient Gardener’s blog where you fill find links to other gardens at the end of March. Thank you to Helen for hosting this meme.
Glebe House Garden 
Looking mighty tidy. Pulling up stones can’t be easy but it will be nice when finished. I agree on daffodil foliage but I would hate to be without those brilliant yellow blooms during this cool grey time of year.
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Thanks Lisa…I have some paid help for that!
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That is a great way to plant daffodils. I go for the medium-sized varieties and plant them with hardy perennials that will spring up and cover their horrid leaves. I love the structure in your garden – your walls, pleached limes and your paving. And I do love a corkscrew hazel!
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Thanks Ali, I have only been doing the daffs like that for a few years
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That is a lot of pollarding and pleaching. Not many know how to do that anymore.
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Hi Tony, yes that preached lime is special for me although it is very much my version of a pleached lime
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Is that because it is both pleached and pollarded?
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Erythronium is one of my favorite spring ephemeral bulbs. I have a couple, a handful of pink ones and a huge clump of yellow that I really should divide. That’s a great tip to dealing with daffodil foliage.
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Hi Alison the yellow ones seem to come up later. No doubt they will feature later in the year.
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That looks like a lot of work, but well worth the effort. I have a corkscrew hazel, but only tiny catkins which are formed in late summer. Is there something I should be doing to this (inherited) tree? All I have done so far is to remove any straight shoots. It did have quite an infestation of sawfly larvae last year.
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Hi, your hazel may be due to the sawfly and you are correct to take out the straight branches. We do nothing special so it could just be different varieties.
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I pruned my roses just before the icy winds and snow. All the buds I’d pruned back to have died and a Nast liquid is weeping from the cuts. Do you think they will survive Steve? Your roses look fabulous the way you’ve pruned them on the wall, and I do like your Iris, does it return reliably for you?
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Hi Christina I had the same problem with the roses starting early and then getting caught in a frost. I am sure they will survive. The iris is reliable around our area.
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Thanks for reassuring me Steve. Maybe the roses are the least of my worries.
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It’s been a crazy Spring so far. I think I’ve managed about two days work this March. At last there are now some (slightly) warmer days in the forecast but it’s going to be an uphill task to catch up.
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I agree the weather has been awful and i guess we are all well behind. Tricky as we have our first load of people coming round the garden in a couple of weeks!
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