My March garden diary as spring rolls out

Each day brings new changes to the garden and to the Cornish countryside too as we race towards the spring equinox on Friday. Of course, in reality every hedgerow and bank is a garden at the moment with bright primroses tucked between the mossy stones beside the lanes and flower pickers hard at work in the flower fields. Already now some fields have “bolted” and been left unpicked as a blaze of golden yellow to catch the eye unexpectedly. In the Ednovean farm garden the first tulip opened today and so I thought I had better start my monthly diary before those daffodil days were gone!

Every year the bulbs in the borders seemingly come back to life at the exact moment when we need a treat after the long monochrome winter. I packed sweetly scented hyacinths near the house, not really design but I couldn’t quite resist buying the tempting pots with nearly every shop to pop in our guest bathrooms or pop on a landing as a sweetly smelling treat. Then of course each year the retired bulbs had to find a new home and they were pushed at random into a convenient space. I’ve finally had to control this particular habit before we reached overload but the swirl of scent below a flight of steps or along a path is probably much the better option. Also for nearer the house I’ve chosen the miniature daffodil varieties as gorgeous as they are there is a long delay of watching the yellowing strappy leaves die down, under the threat that just one snip to the fading foliage would bring Armageddon or at least no flowers the following year. And so the bigger flashier varieties are naturalised in grass in the wilder corners of the garden so that when the time comes they can genteelly fade with charm and for that, matter mostly out of sight.

Through out the garden the self seeded Echiums, so loved by the bees and butterflies, are stirring poised to make their bolt skywards. We started with echium panina, a fairly tender bi annual native of Tenerife but some have cross pollinated with the perennial version to produce a multi stemmed “nearly perennial version” which leads to an exotic mix. In fact I’m quite looking forward to next month!