This photo doesn’t quite reflect that and that’s because it was only taken recently. It has taken me about three weeks to catch the blossom in the sunshine and take a picture. It’s been dull and usually raining at any other time. By now – especially with the recent windy weather – there’s only half the blossom left on the tree, the other half is all over the garden.

The shedding of the cherry blossom about the garden marks another point in the year for me. It’s the passing from the excitement of spring into the more stately and inevitable march of early summer, where the garden grows higher, fills out further and continues to flower. The small and delicate early flowers of spring will be replaced with the large and bold blooms of summer. It’s a different feeling of excitement and anticipation.

I can’t adequately put into words what it feels like to sit beneath the tree at this time of year. The ground is pink with a cover of soft petals and the arching boughs overhead are heavy with hanging blossom. The wind blows through the tree canopy, making the branches sway lazily and loose petals are caught on the gusts and swirl around me before landing somewhere in the garden, filling out the carpet of pink. It is quite moving and there’s only a one week window where it will feel like this, then the magic is gone for another year.

They were planted out by the Autumn and have come through the winter and are currently beginning to flower.

The more observant will notice that the flower is definitely not blue. Perhaps the blue colour will develop in time as this flower has just opened and you can see blue tinges to the petals. It certainly looks pretty and there are many more flowers opening up, which will keep me busy deadheading them once I have collected the seed for the next generation.

Note: Aquilegia seed may need stratifying before it will successfully germinate. I’ll have to read into this before sowing.

It’s kind of crept up on me. I haven’t really been keeping track of the numbers. This garden blog is still more about how the garden and the plants in it grow and develop, with lots of pictures and “notes to self” along the way.

As I’m taking far more pictures than I used to, there should be lots of “before and after amazing transformation” comparisons ahead. These are really important for me to remember how I started (and what I started with) and really helps give a sense of progress and the feeling  of satisfaction that goes with it.

I’m also taking one picture each month looking through the garden arch and will build up a series of 12 pictures showing a year in the garden. I’m really looking forward to having all the pictures at the end of the year. There will be no sneak peeks or early previews and there are still seven months remaining until the set is complete.

Now call me obsessive-compulsive, but it only took a few hours to around all the border edges with a pair of kitchen scissors, trimming the grass to give a real sharp edge to the lawn.

I think it looks very neat and perhaps the time was well spent if you’re opening for NGS or expecting a visit from the RHS, but perhaps not when it’s cold, wet, muddy and getting dark (as it was in my case).

There wasn’t much to do outside anyway but when we got back, I got the distinct impression that the plants had a bit of a party while we were away. The grass had become overgrown and the garden is beginning to look a little bit of a jungle – in a good way.

Mowing the grass and giving the edges a good trim should set things right again.

That page can be summed up as follows:

• Year 1 (2009): Wisteria is bought from the local garden centre, planted and wire runners are fixed to the walls. It quickly takes hold and begins to grow.
• Year 2: (2010): Wisteria’s first proper season starts with two small racemes of flowers. After that it races to encircle the kitchen window before winter
• Year 3 (2011): Wire runners extended. We’re treated to a display of five racemes. It branches out but doesn’t seem as vigorous as the previous year
• Year 4 (2012): Wisteria goes “floribundant”:

Right now it is flowering all along its length. Flowers closest to the roots have almost finished while those at the end are still in bud, waiting to open. Most of the wisterias around us have decades on our young plant, but if it looks like this in just a few years then imagine what it will look like at the end of the decade.

One thing the picture can’t give you a sense of is the incredible perfume coming off the flowers. Waves of heady scent that hits you on a still day as soon as you step out of the back door. It just fills this part of the garden with the most incredible fragrance.

For me, it’s the highlight of spring in the garden and will only get better each year.

I don’t have a very good picture of the blossom this year because the weather has been so bad that all the pictures I try and take are too dark and look awful – there’s been no sunshine.

With the dry, sunny spring we had last year we sat, ate and relaxed underneath the cherry blossom but the way the weather is going this year, it will be over before we’re able to walk around on the grass without squelching. It’s a such a shame, I look forward to the blossom but I’m going to have to enjoy it from the warmth and dry of the kitchen window.

This one is nestled by the trunk of the ornamental cherry. I’m fascinated by the way different plants unfold, unroll, unfurl, uncoil, grow new leaves, there seems to be countless ways of doing it. Ferns look particularly unusual and spectacular when they grow new leaves like this each spring.

There’s a couple of Japanese Painted ferns that I need to move (rescue) as they don’t grow very large and they’re being smothered by other plants around them so they’ll have to planted somewhere more visible. I also have an idea for a pot by the front door – I want to put a large fern in it – to brighten it up. The front door faces north and never gets sun, so it should be ideal.

They remind me of a fried egg where the yolk broke about halfway through cooking. They’re looking a bit miserable now after a month of rain and I despite saying I would, I still have not got round to feeding them. If I had put bonemeal down then the rain would have washed that through the soil by now but I’ve missed the opportunity. I’ll have to try liquid feed before it’s too late. I just hope that next year, I don’t end up with a no-show like the previous year was. If I do, then I’ll only have myself to blame.

The daily showers (sometimes more heavy rain to occasional thunderstorms) have meant that the last few buckets of manure that I need to sift through are now very, very wet. What’s worse than hand-sifting rotted manure is hand-sifting soaking wet well-rotted manure. When there’s too much water in it, that’s when it feels like…you know what, I’m not going there. Suffice to say it’s going to have to spend a while drying before I resume working on it again and at this rate, that will be sometime in July.