Easter Break

I didn't do any gardening over Easter - I was away visiting family. When I came back I did a tour of the garden to see what was going on. Here are some of the highlights:

The first of my tulips is showing colour - a lovely bright red.

My other tulips are not far behind, and should all come out over the next few days if the weather is nice.

This is a small flowering cherry - Prunus Kuriliensis "Brilliant", with a birch tree above it. The cherry is growing in a large pot at the end of the garden.

The rose pruning I did earlier in the year is beginning to produce results. Here is one of the rose branches which I trained horizontally against the fence. You can see how this has encouraged upright shoots along the length of the branch and these should produce flowers.

These are the sweet peas which I sowed a few weeks back. I am quite pleased at how well they have grown.

The sunflowers have also germinated, but I think the slugs have had a go at them. The mouldy nasturtium seeds have (unsurprisingly) not germinated. In my heated propagator, the nicotiana and eryngium seeds have also sprouted. I'm quite pleased with the seeds so far but I'm not good at getting seeds to flowering size - that's the tricky bit.

I've got a number of flowers in bud. This is a snakes-head fritillary - I created a boggy patch especially to grow these. I'm glad they are surviving.

This is a clematis which is growing over my rose arch.

These are erythronium "Pagoda" which thrive in my front garden in a very dry shady spot.

This is a shoot from one of the pink lilium cerneum bulbs I planted in a pot in February. I like the spiky pinky-orange shoots.  Two of the bulbs have come up, but I think a squirrel may have stolen the third one - I found a hole where the bulb should be when I went out this evening.

This is Angelica Archangelica. Last week, it looked dead and a bit sad. This week it has trebled in size. It is a biennial which failed to flower last year so this is its third and probably final year. It should grow quickly to around four feet tall, and flower in May, before setting seed and dying. I love plants that do dramatic things.