My friend and I had a wonderful day at Harrogate Spring Flower Show, even a bit of rain didn’t dampen our spirits, we even laughed about being towed off the field because it was so muddy! We laughed even more when my friend rang her OH (We were in his car) to let me know we would be a bit late due to being towed off field. He commented on how dirty the outside of the car would be. My friend quickly replied ‘Oh the outside is fine…’ There was a few moments silence as he realised what that meant 🙂

I think it’s the first time we’ve been when we have both got big garden projects in progress, so we both bought a large amount of plants, I don’t think the car has ever been so full, the back seat was down and I still had one large camillia bush between my feet at the front!

I got quite a few plants that were on my shopping list, an acer, a eunonymous alatus (Spindle tree, it turns an amazing shade of red in the autumn!) rhododendrons, iris, aquilegia, orange flowered honeysuckle and lots of clematis…together with quite a few impulse buys!

I’d been clearing beds and weeding in preparation for all these plants though I still need to rotavate three beds. My lovely OH carried lots of trugs of beautiful compost from the old heap down to lower beds, ready for me to dig it in, trying to improve my clay soil. I’ll probably dig a bag of pea shingle in this bed as well whilst I’m at it to help with drainage.

The AA garden is starting to fill out and look like a garden. I moved a peony last week when it was only about 3″ tall, it’s shot up this week!

One shrub that I saved when clearing beds for the AA garden is a chaenomeles (Japanese quince) it has just started flowering. The flowers seem to peep out from under the leaves but they are a lovely deep shade of red.

I finally managed to paint the top of the fence, my eldest is a plumber so he has a long set of ladders, very long and very heavy! The advantage I found with such heavy ladders is that they don’t move an inch, so I felt perfectly safe at the top of them! I just need to finish the fence at the lower end and then give a second coat to what ever I can reach!

A clematis alpina I bought a couple of years ago at the flower show is also flowering, they’re pretty bell shaped blue flowers set against fresh green leaves.  (It’s actually the one in the blue pot in the middle of the photo above.)There’s not as many flowers as I hoped, I might give it a good prune and feed after the flowers have faded and see how it does next year.

This week I’m going to be busy preparing soil and getting everything planted, on Saturday we’ve hopefully got 20 bags of pea shingle arriving to finish off the AA garden and a few other places that need topping up.

I managed to tackle the weeds in the pond garden this week, so it’s looking much better, the solomons seal are growing fast, the brunnera is covered in little blue flowers and the yellow erythroniums are looking very dainty…

…oops, I’ve just spotted a dandelion!