There’s too much going on the garden to be able to write about it and still keep up. Even a scrolling news ticker would fly by so quickly it would just be a blur. Instead, I have three plants that have their own story and space in the garden for special reasons.
Firstly we have an unusual entry in that it is a well-known plant that has bad connotations and has fallen somewhat out of fashion. I’ve never grown it and it is something we inherited. The humble Aubretia, which in our garden tumbles down the patio wall. It is currently purple with flowers and looks amazing, having recovered from being previously smothered by rampant ivy. We like this plant so much we’ll be featuring more of it tumbling from the patio pot plants and having it growing in the drive, giving pools of purple among the honey-coloured gravel.
How does this fall out of fashion?
We then move on to the Forsythia. This is a plant that is currently in full flower and when looking out over the garden, you simply can’t help but be completely distracted by it. Forsythia have a reputation for being gaudy for this reason, but I don’t find them gaudy at all, they’re absolutely glorious. The most vibrant yellow shines out like a beacon across the garden and if it looks this good when only a few feet high, how good is it going to look when it reaches its full height of three metres!?
Remember, it’s glorious, not gaudy
Finally, we have the new Spiraea x Confusa. We left a large, mature shrub of this plant in our previous garden and I used to look forward to it flowering every year. Each spring it erupts into a mass of white flowers, thousands upon thousands of them, densely packed together, smothering the shrub in white that glows in twilight. I was very sad to leave this shrub behind, but when we created Magnolia Hill, we bought a new Spiraea as a replacement. Although it will be several years before this new shrub reaches the size of the original, it is already flowering and putting on a lovely show, reminiscent of the full show that the new owners must be enjoying in our old garden.
A nostalgic flower show
So there is the Spring Tryptic. There are other plants in flower, but these three are the ones stealing the show at the moment and I hope they will continue to do so year after year.
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