What's in bloom in May?

It  might be May but looking out at my garden it seems to be more like an April garden.  It feels it too with that incessant cold wind!  Seed sowing of the hardy annuals was delayed until the beginning of May as April was the coldest month since 1986 here in Perthshire.  

The daffodils and tulips are still in flower and the garden looks so different compared to What's in bloom in May 2012, What's in bloom in May 2011 and What's in bloom in May 2010.   I've had one sighting of the Orange tip butterflies and on the few occasions when it's been warm and sunny the bee flies have been darting around the garden at warp speed.  

Let's meet the family....it's portrait time!

Moist well drained shade can be daunting especially for first time gardeners.  You want colour like everywhere else in the garden but this one area defeats you time and again. You've spent money on plants..........they look great for a few weeks .....then they just sulk and never flower...........or worse still never re-appear after the winter.  You really wanted this part of the garden to have colour like all the others parts  but "what's ever going to grow here from one year to the next?"......I hear  you exclaim!

Well there are some woodland plants that grow in my garden that thrive in moist well drained shade with wedgewood blue flowers during April | May.  They are reliable herbaceous hardy perennials so every subsequent year they  will grow and flower better and better...... so let me introduce you to them.

It's Family Portrait Time!

Integrating spring into summer at Branklyn Garden

Nestled into the slopes of Kinoull Hill and overlooking the River Tay and Perth is Branklyn Garden which belongs to the National Trust of Scotland.  It's a garden that holds many National Collections along with some rare and unusual plants.  

At this time of year the garden is just bursting with colour from the spring flowering woodlanders.  Pathways are lined with hellebores and drift after drift of soft lemon cowslips meander through the borders along with corydalis in shades of lilac, white and pink.  Many of the rhododendron and trillium flowers are just emerging from their buds. The prunus trees are exuberantly coming into flower while the upper canopy of leaves from the many maples and birches are just beginning to unfurl.  All against a backdrop of a large alpine rock garden and many shades of green and blue from the conifers.

What's in bloom in April?

What's in bloom in my Perthshire garden in April 2013?  Well lately patience has really become a virtue  when it comes to waiting for Spring as we're never quite sure when it will arrive. Astronomically speaking Spring arrived on 20th March 2013 with the vernal equinox, while for meteorologists it arrived on 1st March.  For the gardener here in Scotland it probably feels like Spring just arrived in the past few days.   Everything in the garden is so late at coming into growth as nature stood still and dormant for the latter half of March and early April.   

We had snow and the harshest Siberian easterly wind I have ever felt.  Many seasoned gardeners  have told me that that's the way March used to be here in the early 1960's.  

Anyway we all know that  there's going to be an explosion of colour here in the not too distant future.  Those buds on the trees will be bursting into bloom and now that the wind direction has changed the migratory birds will soon be making an appearance.  Until that happens.......and it will.........eventually here's what's in flower in the leavesnbloom April garden.

Whats in bloom in March

Welcome back again to my Perthshire wildlife garden and I've some lovely little blooms for you to enjoy today.  The garden is slowly springing into colour and it's wonderful to enjoy daylight a little longer as each week goes by.  The weather hasn't made it easy to do much gardening as we've had freezing temperatures and snow but it certainly is a joy to look out through the windows and see life returning to the flower borders again.  Last March you would've got a suntan here in Perthshire and for a few days we were warmer than California and Cyprus. The plants hadn't a clue what had happened and neither did the wildlife.  Fast forward to March 2013 and it's