I’ve started tracking my garden through instagram. The alliums have started to flower and are just so ridiculously cheerful as bright white and purple pom-poms. The smaller pinkish alliums are appearing in the new beds whilst the yellow alliums are just about to brighten up the gravel. Last year at the Chelsea Flower Show we fell in love with the allium display, not really noting that they’d had all their leaves cut off. The reason why has become obvious with slugs and snails really enjoying making a mess of them. Still worthwhile though.

The surprise has been the early appearance of the pink roses which are now flowerful enough to need to cut. We headed off to the shops for two new smaller bowls just to cope with the overspill of rose blooms about to go over. The white roses have yet to make an appearance en-masse but they are a year younger and it is still ridiculously early in the year. Bizarrely the nine roses were planted out at regular intervals (measured by an OCD partner) but have grown quite obviously into three groups of three. It’s not unattractive, but it’s certainly unexpected. I’ve replaced some penstemon in the gaps.

The very old roses are flowering but very straggly and riddled with blackspot. The books tell me that this fungal disease is basically endemic to all rose plants though the younger varieties should have some resistance. Anti-fungal sprays are available but th basic answer seems to be to remove the infected leaves and try to limit the re-spread that way. Maybe if I feed the roses and keep them relatively well watered it will help them just through avoiding plant stress.

My hanging baskets are still alive which is cheering though only because I’m still in the first month of watering. This year I’ve added some of those water retentive pellets to them, but ultimately the answer is pretty obviously to water them daily and not lose interest after 6 weeks. Ho hum.

This year I’ve added some white leucanthemum to a border for late Summer and a couple of white lupins in front of the magnolia shrub. I’m finding white works well against the green and looks sharper in late Summer when everything starts to look a little dry and tired. Though I’m still not sure how any of this will hold together if we go away for a three week trip to Japan.

Most of the pots are still in the courtyard part of the garden where they were all brought for our last trip in order to try out a new automatic watering system. In the end we just set it to continuously drip rather than sticking it on a timer. The tap into the garden is so old we struggled to find any connector that would work reliably. I’ve added a fats in a pot to make the area look even more lush and jungle-like.

It means that all of the potted ferns are together though they could usefully be moved towards the very back, the dry dark garden, which is currently being overrun by geraniums. Again. Geraniums, tiarella, woodruff, euphorbia and bugold are impossible to kill but pull out in a very satisfying manner. Obviously euphorbia is an irritant so gloves will be required for any serious removals.

There’s also quite a lot of weeding to be done up on the gravel roof with clover picking through the gravel everywhere. A little bit of rain and a lot of sunshine make the weeding up there look a little daunting. I’m wondering whether to put the miniature confer I have in a pot in the middle of the bed within the blue grasses, but it might just look a bit twee.

So everything seems to be arriving a little bit early, including the weeds and as normal, I’m putting off the weeding.

It does look beautiful though.