Planning Notes (Flower Border, Spring)

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I find it very difficult to visualise what I want a bit of the garden to look like in a particular season at the time when it's necessary to do the work for that season.  So, I thought I'd take a photo of my flower border in the back garden and make some notes on what I want it to look like this time next year.

Here it is.  Can you see the lambs in the field - aren't they gorgeous?  We stand and watch them for ages.  It's enough to turn you vegetarian.

As you can see there's quite a lot of work to be done in the back garden.  The main problem with the flower border is that it doesn't really have a shape.  It's meant to be a sinuous "S" shape...I need to get round it with an edger and some grass seed! 

However, another problem is that there are no colours apart from green and white at this time of year.  So, I've decided that next Spring I'm going to keep it simple but introduce some really strong colour - three big clumps of big, what I call "proper" daffodils, the most gorgeous Spring flower there is. 

They will sustain me through to April - the first months of the year before the garden comes back to life can be difficult ones and a bit of cheery colour makes all the difference.  I'm going to put them in - as I said - three big clumps, one, I think just in front of viburnum - who's getting the chop after he's finished flowering as he's getting a bit rampant - one in between the temperamental possible philadelphus and weigela - due for the chop too - and one just to the right of the little blobs of aquilegia that you can see near the right edge of the photo.

That's not all though.  What I'm really excited about is my plan for growing bulbs in pots.  I'm going to go to the garden centre and buy LOADS - 12 is the number I'm thinking of - of terracotta pots, and fill them with hyacinths and different varieties of daffodils and tulips.  I'm going to find a variety of daffodil which flowers really early so I can have colour right from January onwards, and then go mad with different varieties of tulips.  I can move the pots around depending on what's flowering and where I want splashes of colour to go - I can sit them in the flower border, line them up on the veg patches, put them around the front door, arrange them them in the front garden - I can't wait!  And you know what the best thing's going to be?  Forgetting what I've planted and waiting breathlessly for first the little green shoot to appear, which gets bigger and bigger then slowly, almost luxuriously unfurls, revealing the gleam of colour within which in turn becomes a beautiful flower - magic!