Well spring has finally sprung, we’ve had some lovely mild spring days here in Yorkshire so I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the garden this week. We also had a solar eclipse, I was planning to sit in the summerhouse to experience it, but I very quickly realised there were some trees in the way!! I retreated to an upstairs window! It was quite overcast and cloudy but I felt that worked to our advantage as you could watch it without worrying about retinal damage. In Yorkshire we had about 97% eclipse, I was surprised it didn’t get particularly dark or cool, maybe that 3% makes all the difference! The photo looks dark and dramatic, but that’s cameras for you!!

I’m blitzing the front garden at the moment, I’ve got quite a big front garden which was already terraced when we moved in. I like to think of it as a low maintenance garden as it’s mainly planted with shrubs. I prune everything hard at this time of year and then leave it, mainly because within a couple of months a lot of it is not easily accessible!

Things are not always what they seem in the garden…last year this big clump of ornamental grass seemed to be swamping the nearby shrub, I decided to try and move the grass, it proved hard work and after a while I started to look at the shrub…that’s the bully!! It had suckered and spread into all it’s neighbours! So instead of moving the grass, I’ve trimmed it and cut the shrub back hard, see what happens this year! By the way, the pretty golden leaved shrub behind is actually a golden privet, unpruned, I love it!

I spent yesterday digging up this area of euphorbia and perennial lobelia as it had got totally out of hand, I’ve cleared a big area, dug out bags of mares tail roots too. I’m thinking of planting a couple of rhododendrons and maybe an acer. I interspersed it with trimming a box into a ball (give my back a rest!) now my family know why I always took the children to the hairdressers and never attempted it myself!

There’s some gorgeous daffodils in flower under a ceanothus bush, long stems but really tiny flowers, very pretty. I’ve seen butterflies and ladybirds this weekend, so things are definitely warming up!