The clocks have changed and so has everything!

I hadn't realised it had been so long since my last blog. February and March are a time of year that promise so much but most often winter is not yet ready to relinquish her hold and even though its getting lighter, the cold, especially this far north means you have to be patient a little bit longer.

Its been a very weird month, just as the garden centres have finished clearing away the Christmas stuff and starting to fill with plants we find ourselves on lockdown! The wind and rain has finally subsided and everything is drying up, like every other gardener I am champing at the bit to get going and suddenly we can't go anywhere. That virus that caused so much pain in China in the early part of the year is now causing havoc across the rest of the world including here. It has meant a great deal of uncertainty and fear and I guess now we need our gardens more than ever.

A casualty of the lockdown has been the SGS garden visits and mine has also been cancelled...at least for now. But the work goes on and the garden is awakening. The daffodils are out and the tulips are coming on at a pace. There is a sense of everything speeding up and we actually had a warm sunny day that felt so good after the Baltic gales we seem to have had for so long.

I've been doing a fair bit of rearranging of the last few months and this years garden really will be a bit of a surprise. As I've been stomping back and forwards over the beds I realised that all except for one candelabra primula had disappeared. I was gutted, all the ones I had grown from fresh seed on damp kitchen roll and planted out last summer...gone! Looking back at old pictures I noticed that the side of the pond where I had been walking was precisely where the prims were or at least, had been. Very disappointing. I did have a notion to put a wee perching seat by the back of the pond and thanks to a friend who had ripped out a load of decking which has not made it to the stove but instead has been laid where the old coal bunker was and with enough left over to do lots of wee jobs, I made bench. And then I thought it would be a good idea to make a wee path to the bench so that I would not squish any more plants on the way to the seat. So, armed with a bag of bark chippings and some landscape fabric I dug a wee, shallow trench to set the fabric in and in the process I chopped up a candelabra primula...bugger! Luckily there was still a good bit of root system so it was hastily replanted in another part of the pond side. Then I did the same to another one, and another. The good news is that they are growing, so looks like my feet and and the spade may have knocked them back, but only a little...and now I have a path, and a seat and somewhere to watch my fish and contemplate and reflect. In these strange times I expect there are many people also engaged in reflection. There's a quietness in the world, less traffic noise and more bird song and if you listen carefully there's another sound...I think its mother nature breathing.