End of Month View: a Warm and Fuzzy Feeling

We are all conscious of February being a shorter month, albeit only two or three days shorter, but I am in no particular hurry to see the back of it and welcome March and the increasing promise of spring. How so? Well, the garden here has brought me so much joy in February, creating a  warm and fuzzy glow deep in my soul. Every time I ramble in it or gaze at it through the windows, even when the weather is less clement, it graciously offers up a surprisingly wide range of flowering plants and foliage as well as the preened bare bones of its structure. It is not just the satisfaction of tasting the fruits of the creation that generates this warm fuzzy glow, but the knowledge that others can sense a similar joy when they ramble in my footsteps.

We had positive feedback from all the visitors when we opened the garden a fortnight ago, but I didn’t mention that the visitors included two ladies who were visiting for the fourth time, having come very year we opened and clearly feeling the repeat visits were worthwhile. I happened to bump into one of these ladies during the week and she told me how not just much they enjoyed it, but how she had been trying to explain to another friend that this February visit was every bit as enjoyable as a June one. Having wanted to demonstrate to visitors that there could be things of interest in their gardens all the year round, this certainly suggests that the point has been made.

So, above is the view we see from the main kitchen windows, with tulip foliage now poking up through the Bellis perennis in many of the pots and fresh foliage bursting out on the roses and clematis, whilst below is that from the back sitting room, speaking for itself with the fragrant shrubs, bulbs and vibrant cornus and primroses.

The woodland is alive with emergent wood anemones, bluebells and wild garlic, with fritillary now in bud:

From the bothy we look out over the main herbaceous borders:

The same borders (the subject of the germ of an idea for a New Project) from ground level, the bronze heuchera bed and clematis colonnade, and the woodland edge border from both ends, choc-a-bloc with snowdrops and hellebores:

The currently uninspiring bold borders:

Inside the working greenhouse, with Winter Sunshine sweet peas enjoying their root freedom and now up to about 18″ tall, and rather too many trays of seedlings considering it is only the end of February!

The blue & white border and stark (but tidy!)rose border:

The special snowdrop border, the snowdrops past their best but the hellebores (all white or green) thriving and happy:

Down one side of the house we have the new entrance border…

And down the other we have the Coop and the Coop Corner, the former beginning to reward patience as more bulbs break into bloom, and the latter with hellebores and Clematis armandii playing starring roles:

I would not expect you to get the same warm and fuzzy glow from looking at these pictures, but I hope they convey at least some of the flavour of my garden at the end of February, a relatively mild albeit very damp February.