Spring Has Sprung

Spring has arrived early in England this year. After a successions of very wet Aprils, this one is turning out to be lovely. This is good news for gardeners like me who never catch up if they can't get to work in the garden until May. My soil here is a heavy clay which means that it's too hard to dig in the Summer and Winter and mostly muddy in between. Despite that the garden is full of colour at the moment.

This is my Japonica which is sometimes known as the poor man's quince. Like the quince it has hard fruit that takes a long time to cook but makes the most beautiful red preserve.  My plum tree is a mass of blossom too so I'm crossing my fingers that the weather lets the fruit set this year; heavy rain has resulted in very few fruit for several years.

I cut that yellow Berberis right back a couple of years ago as it was trying to grow horizontally across to the other side of my narrow garden. Needless to say, it's on its way again.

It's been a good year for primroses too. Mine are all wild ones that found their way into the garden on their own. There are lots of the normal yellow ones ...

... but also quite a few in various shades of pink too.

And I think this one is very nearly red ...

Another favourite at the moment is my ornamental blackcurrant which has the most beautiful delicate pink flowers. 

The flowers have gone now but the little Magnolia Stellata in my tiny front garden was lovely a few weeks ago too. The only photo I have is this one showing its first flowers. 

My daughter and I were competing to see whose magnolia would flower first. Mine just about won but I have to admit that hers is a tiny bit more impressive.

I've been trying to grow Snake's Head Fritillary in the garden but most of them didn't take. I do get a few every year though, at least until Tolly spots them.

He either bats them down with his paw to stop them moving in the breeze or just bites the stalk until the flowers drop off. So far this year, he hasn't spotted these ...

It's only when you catch them before they open out that you can see why they're called 'snake's head'. The division between the petals looks like a mouth and you can even see spots of darker colouring which could be the eyes. Once they open out there's nothing snake like about them.

What with all this Spring colour outdoors I thought it was time to fish out some decorations to mark the new season. After a morning rooting around in boxes (all in the room I'm decorating at the moment of course) I ended up with this.

A mish mash of new and old things that make me smile every time I see them. These shelves are up in my bedroom on the top floor and are perfect for arrangements like this. I'd like to say I'll do a different arrangement for each season but I probably won't manage it.

In the early evening the low sun creates the most perfect shadows of the ornaments on the wall.

That mottled effect on the wall is because of the old glass in the window. It's not as smooth as modern glass so the light makes patterns like this.

The newest thing on the shelves is the little beaded toadstool house near the bottom which I only finished making just in time.

This is another wonderful pattern from ThreadABead. I really enjoy making their designs; at the moment I'm working on the fourth of the little houses from their Christmas Village series.

This is going to be the Gingerbread Bakery. After this I'm going to bead some little trees to stand among the houses.

Other than that, I've been decorating the first half of what used to be my bedroom. I've started with the worst half which involved doing a fair bit of plastering and filling before I could even start painting.

Then my daughter and I spent several hours scraping old paint off the door lock so that I can paint it black. Doesn't it look a mess?

I've just started painting the door so I'll be able to show you an 'after' picture soon. As you can see, the door doesn't line up with the frame; most of my doors are like that, they've warped quite a bit over the last century or so.

I am still working on my patterns. At the moment I'm writing up my Ten Stitch Rectangle which is taking ages. It took me the best part of a week to get the first three or four pages done and I hadn't even got to the casting on. It's going a bit better now though.

I'll leave you with the dwarf hyacinths in the old sink in the garden. These came from my Dad's garden. He could grow absolutely anything and I often think of him when I'm with my plants.