Ten First Flowers

I had a garden dream: an overflowing mass of flowering abundance, red and orange and yellow at one end of the front garden; blue and purple and white at the other.

But as the saying goes, the only place where success comes before work is the dictionary. At the end of autumn (i.e. May) I summoned my energies, such as they were, and built two garden beds in the front garden.

The results, it must be said, are not entirely what I had hoped for. For one thing, a heavy layer of cardboard and a few inches of garden mix were not enough to put off the weeds, which have grown back in profusion: creeping buttercup, convolvulus, dock…

But some plants did manage to make their presence felt despite the weeds. I therefore present you with the ten best blooms from late winter to early summer.

In the early days of expanses of bare soil relieved mostly by weeds it was a comfort to have the freesias (a thoughtful gift) spring up and give the impression this was actually a garden.

A cheerful cluster of small six-petalled yellow blooms rises above green foliage.
Freesia (Golden Giant? Golden Melody?)
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The Other Kind of Lime Scale

Not the sort which forms on the inside of kettles when your water’s a bit on the hard side. That kind is something that simply happens of its own accord. The kind we’ve got is something else entirely – it’s intentional.

Coccidae
We have a little lime tree in a pot. It wasn’t doing terribly well earlier this year, so I dosed it with nitrogen and Epsom salts and compost and mulch, and it perked up a bit. It perked up a jolly lot more when I discovered the existence of scale insects, and gave it a drenching with some organic anti-scale spray.

In due course I moved the lime into a larger pot, and it continued flourishing. But hist! the plot thickens. The ants which had always seemed interested in the lime continued their attentions in the new pot. I don’t usually interfere with the doings of ants who keep outside the house, but this…seemed odd. I suspected. I inspected. I learned the dreadful truth.

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