SEASONAL NOTES - MARCH 2025

I can hardly believe it’s been over a year since I have written a blog post on the garden. Reflecting on this I realise there is one main factor: the weather last year. It was a terrible year for gardening in general but even more so when you are dealing with a high altitude garden in one of the wettest, coolest regions of the country! With climate change slowly impacting, the seasons have become erratic, even since I moved here 22 years ago. The winters are less cold so there is less snow and less frost to kill the pests and allow the soil to lie dormant. Yes, even soil has to rest! It is a living element, pumped full of life and organisms - a complete ecosystem which sometimes needs to be fallow, to lie low, to heal and recuperate its vital energy after so much activity. Just like us. 

And this leads me neatly to another factor in my lack of gardening last year: I seemed to be beset by my own structural issues! I lurched from back pain to knee pain to hip pain to elbow pain to foot pain to neck pain and all the way round again in a seeming never-ending cycle. Of course many of us may know that famous song, ‘Your hip bone’s connected to your thigh bone…’ etc etc with each verse ending ‘dem bones, dem bones, dem bones…’ Well, I was well aware of all that connectivity last year but sadly it wasn’t through dancing - just joint injuries from sport and their knock-on effect around my muscular-skeletal body. All of which meant that I have spent over 12 months in pain which has sapped my energy and restricted my movement. I have been seeing a Personal Trainer, physios and chiropractors but just as one injury heals something else seems to happen. My latest is slipping on a dog walk on a muddy bank and twisting my knee - just 48 hours after I’d announced to my PT that the one part of me I never had an issue with was my knees! A ski trip just two weeks later, then a month travelling in Australia with much walking involved, and my most recent ski trip (all of which were booked and committed to months ago) has done nothing to help. No sympathy required - it’s my own fault I haven’t been able to rest - but it certainly impacts my energy levels and ability to do gardening jobs. 

As I write this, I am resting up on the bed - a rare half hour - which is frustrating because it’s a beautiful sunny Spring day and I’d love to be outside pottering, planting, pruning and planning but I have to be content with looking out of my window at the pale blue skies and fields turning greener by the day and sheep coming into lamb. I am not complaining! 

But before I came upstairs to rest my leg, I did have a brief half hour in the garden because I simply knew I had to, even if it wasn’t good for the knee as I’d already been standing on it all morning and it was swelling badly. It was too lovely a day to miss, so I hobbled up the garden path to the vegetable patch where the raised beds have just been renovated (and now await more soil to get them set for planting) and had a bit of a tidy up. I pulled away all the dead brown fern leaves which take over in the summer months, I pruned the espaliered apple trees, I cleared autumn leaves (nicely dry now) and pine needles and the green detritus from the tree and hedge work we had done in the autumn. The rhododendron hedge has been massively cut back to let in more light, as have various hollies nearby. I have become so despondent by my lack of produce in recent years (not helped by the fact that I am often away during mid-summer) that I have nearly given up trying to grow vegetables. Yet having created the vegetable patch well over 10 years ago, when I was studying Horticulture at Reaseheath College, and at the height of my horticultural enthusiasm, it makes me sad to let it all slip away. So I doggedly try each year to make the growing environment better and plant things up with high hopes, only to be disappointed. It’s either too wet, or too dry, or I’m away at just the wrong times…

So why do I carry on? I’m not sure really. Perhaps because the act of vegetable gardening is good for the soul. Even if I get only a handful of raspberries and potatoes I am happy. I get lots of apples and enjoy making chutney with them or treating the sheep and llama to them if they’re less than perfect. In some years I get runner beans - not by the bucketful but just enough for a few meals. Likewise the potatoes. And a freshly picked and eaten courgette has a taste like nothing you can get in a shop. My biggest crop is always the redcurrants and blackcurrants if I can get to them before the birds do. Netting them doesn’t always work - the birds get in through the tiniest gap and can strip the berries off overnight! - so another project this year is to build a proper protective fruit cage. I love making redcurrant jelly, sometimes mixing them in with blackcurrants and blackberries to make a tangy-sweet hedgerow jam. There is nothing better than a row of jam jars newly filled with a glistening gloop of gorgeousness!

Beyond the vegetable patch, the garden is doing well. We had the tree surgeon in again to cut back the boundary hedges and to remove and/or cut back some trees which were shutting out too much light, or had self-seeded in the wrong place, or had simply grown to big and bulky for their space. Cutting anything down comes hard to me, but our tree surgeon has blood in his veins like mine and considers every option very carefully and is far from the male slasher and burner we are often used to in the garden (of which my husband is one and whom I’m constantly having to reign in!). He appreciates that our garden is somewhat of an arboretum, having been laid out in Victorian times. Our joint goal is always to ‘cut out the dead wood’, quite literally, and allow the stars of the show to shine. With this always in mind, we have managed to open things up a bit, allow in more light for the under layers to benefit from, and to highlight the different species of tree. In the process, more vistas have been opened up of the surrounding fields, hills, moors and reservoir, re-connecting the garden with its original environment and spirit of place. 

For me, spirit of place is a fundamental for country garden planning - taking one’s inspiration from the landscapes and nature surrounding it rather than imposing a rigid design based on your own set ideas which might be out-of-keeping with the space you actually have in front of you. The influential garden designer, Dan Pearson, writes eloquently on this theme in his book Spirit, which I can highly recommend reading. This is perhaps a theme I shall return to another time…

For now I will leave you with some restful images of the snowdrops which I was delighted to find still flourishing in our garden when I returned from my extended travels at the beginning of March. They were later flowering this year than sometimes. They kept trying to bob their heads up but two exceptionally cold snaps in January and February clearly kept them at bay, for which I’m grateful as it has meant I was not denied the seasonal joy of one of my favourite flowerings of the year. Snowdrops, the humble harbingers of Spring…