New Year’s Day can feel pretty gloomy but our first one at Woodridge started strongly. We’re on a hillside, facing west, so the sun has usually done its fancy sunrise thing by the time we see it. I guess it must have been something special over there to throw colours out south and westward like this.
I started a new contract at Defra, so I spent a lot of January concentrating on that. Just as well the garden didn’t need much attention.
The first signs of life
Things were starting to poke out of the cold ground. First up, the snowdrops. Drifts of them on the bank next to the path, and some dotted about in borders.
Shaftesbury has a snowdrop festival in normal times. All kinds of rare and unusual varieties have been planted in public places, along verges and in gardens. There were some snowdrop paintings in the window of the (closed) arts centre but sadly that was just about it in 2021. As with everything, we’re hoping for it all to happen next year.
In all the darker places I started seeing the first leaves of lords-and-ladies (a.k.a snakeshead, adder’s root, wild arum, devils and angels, cows and bulls, cuckoo-pint, soldiers diddies, priest’s pintle, Adam and Eve, bobbins, naked girls, naked boys, starch-root, wake robin, friar’s cowl, sonsie-give-us-your-hand, jack in the pulpit and cheese and toast) They get their name(s) from the way the flowers and other parts supposedly resemble genitalia. Well of course.
I also stumbled across a stunning helleborus foetidus – stinking hellebore. Gorgeous flowers, no obvious odour (yet?). It’s ahead of the other hellebores, which are coming to life but not quite flowering.
Fighting the urge to do too much too soon
In spare moments I tried being useful with the secateurs. Of course it’s way too early to prune or even deadhead things. Either that or it’s too late. The previous owner seems to have done a decent job of chopping back what needed chopping back in autumn, but I expect there are things I should have done when I got here.
I mainly deadheaded hydrangeas as that seemed obvious and simple. There are at least a dozen of them here. Fingers crossed it isn’t too early and that they survive the cold.
Wishing for snow … and getting our wish
And of course it did get cold around the end of January. With snow!
I follow @DorsetSnow on Twitter and their obvious longing for it to fall and settle was completely matched in our house. It was such a delight to wake up at 4.00am and see the snow had begun to fall. Then go back to bed.
Later we got out into the garden and tramped about as the sun rose. I took loads of photos but here’s just a tiny sample of how the garden is both softened around the edges and sharpened by the black and white contrast.
Looking forward to February
Like I said, I spent a lot of January busy with work. Looks like February will be the same but I’m really hoping the garden will soon start to show me some more of itself.
‘The sun has done its fancy sunrise thing’. Great to have some humour and enthusiastic amateur vibe to a blog on gardening. We are all enthusiastic amateurs in the garden which is half the fun.