Well, the impulse buys have begun! I popped into the supermarket for some milk and came out with 2 pints of milk, 12 bearded iris bulbs (gorgeous colour!) an astrantia root (astrantias like my soil, so I’m trying to get one in every colour!) and a stunning zantedeschia which will look great together with the iris bulbs in our Amethyst and Amber garden! I used to turn my nose up at orange flowers but I love them now, maybe it’s another sign of getting old, like wearing purple!!

A more considered purchase was a new rose from David Austin, last week I moved three roses which weren’t successful at climbing an obelisk. There was one square left where I could plant a replacement. I wanted a rambler that would fit in with the amber colour scheme without being too rampant! Ramblers have much more pliable stems for winding round objects! I googled it and found Ghislaine de Feligonde, a pretty coppery peach colour, and even better, it doesn’t have a lot of thorns! Within a couple of days of ordering, it had arrived and was planted! I planted some viola plugs round the base of the rose as some light ground cover.

We’ve had a mild, dry weekend here in Yorkshire (cold, wet and miserable again today!!) so I spent most of Saturday pottering round, pruning more roses, weeding, dividing perennials…my sedums have been very floppy for the last couple of years which is a sign that they need dividing. I  dug each clump up and used my fork to divide it in two, replanted one and moved the other to the front garden- free plants!

Bulbs are coming up all over the garden, I spotted a couple of crocuses hidden under an obelisk and some stunning blue irises are flowering in a pot. These dwarf daffodils will hopefully flower in the next few days.

I’m a bit nervous about digging too much at the moment as what looks like a bare patch of soil invariably has a plant just waiting to burst through! Perennials are starting to appear in the garden, geraniums, the lovely silver leaves of the perennial cornflower, aquilegias, brunnera, crocosmia…

Shoots are just starting to appear on some of the shrubs too such as philadelphus and this golden berberis.

The bullfinches have been regular visitors to the bird feeders, together with a couple of chaffinches, for some reason the chaffinches struggle with feeders, they can’t stand on the little perches, all the other finches seem to manage though. We’ve had blue tits, great tits, coal tits and the long tailed tits, at this time of year I can watch them flitting through the trees and shrubs as they come along the back lane, round the garden perimeter, to the bird feeder. The robins were hopping nearby when I was gardening, hoping for a worm!

I enjoyed my first cup of coffee in the summerhouse too, spring is just round the corner!