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Bags of lavender

Sometimes, when you least expect it, the garden starts giving you presents. You spend ages fretting over it, feeding it, topping it up with plants. Stuff dies (there is a spot where I want a small tree and so far it has eaten a Hamamelis and a Magnolia, it is the most expensive corner of the garden so far!), the whole thing takes the mickey.

But then the cuttings take better than you ever dreamed they might; plants survive and propagating themselves at will and all sorts of pretties turn up.

Finally shamed into weeding my front garden (north facing, extremely dry, shallow, sandy soil) I was picking out dandelions and rogue goldenrod, I suddenly realised that the lavender had seeded itself into the ridiculously dry and trampled strip by the car. I had no idea lavender did that sort of thing. It is a pink one and while I’m not over excited by the colour the scent is lovely. I think it is 'Miss Katherine', a refugee from a show.

I took softwood cuttings in spring from several other lavenders - excitingly most of these have survived as have the semi-hardwood cuttings I took really-too-late-but-I’ll-try-it.

Weeding is nice because things just appear. Miraculously the tulips seem to have outcompeted the dandelions, Then the verbena bonarienses survived, the Alchemilla is thriving and it is full of little frogs. Sometimes you just don’t need princes.

The picture is of my new mixed border. The rose is ‘Harlow Carr’ the sweet peas are ‘Fragrant Skies’ and the Philadelphus is 'Belle Etoile, it looks and smells lovely.
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