There is no more beautiful flower than a wild primrose – of that I am quite certain! This year they have been particularly good. They started in flower in the lanes very early in the year when the weather was miserable and everything else was dull and dismal, except for the fresh flowers of the primroses. And now as the greenery of Spring is really getting going the wild primroses are still in flower. In the garden the double primroses tend to start a little later than the wild primroses and as we move into April they are looking superb.

I have been finding myself thinking about which are the best and most reliable – but to be honest the list is long. It is key to have the right conditions, of course. They do need damp ground – no lack of that here! But with the right conditions they really are superb plants. ‘Marianne Davey’, an old Barnhaven variety is an extremely good plant with all the freshness of Spring.

For long flowering there are several excellent choices – ‘Sunshine Suzie’ who starts flowering in December and goes on and on. A really bright yellow flower that fades into tinges of apricot; she cheers up the Winter months.

‘Petticoat’, a white double. The flower is smallish but she flowers and flowers. I have used ‘Petticoat’ this year to edge flower bed beside a path. The bed has a lot of the snowdrop ‘S. Arnott’ and I thought this would be a good addition.

Another long-flowering and beautiful double primrose is ‘Easter Bonnet’. Similar in shade to the very old and lovely ‘Quakers’ Bonnet’, this has far more flowers and keeps up its show for months on end.

After an extremely wet winter the garden is still too wet to get any work done properly. The grass is very long and lush but the ground still too wet to walk on in areas. None the less Spring is underway and plants are growing. The daffodils have been a joy. I must remember to get more early varieties however. On dismal days they lift the mood.

When I moved here I inherited a lot of daffodils growing on my hedge (this is Cornwall – a hedge is an earth bank here). Slowly I am managing to identify some of the varieties. They all seem to be pre 1920. The small cup varieties like this one I find very difficult to identify. The differences seem to be very small. However I count myself very lucky since there is a huge range on the hedge. Many very delicate and pretty. And they flower over a very long season starting with the very old ‘Van Sion’ and ‘Glowing Phoenix’ and ending with the small cup varieties.

Now in late March my double primroses are really starting to flower well. This is an old variety ‘Quaker’s Bonnet’ – the old one’s don’t tend to have so many flowers as the modern varieties but they have a lot more charm and I treasure them. I have several newly bred double primroses this year. They are all sold bred by David Kerley famous for his trademark Belarina range of double primroses. I think many of them are extremely good. I have always loved ‘Belarina Cream’ which has a lovely fresh look to it and is trouble free in cultivation. Another favourite of mine is ‘Delft Blue’. David says it is too leafy because he is aiming for wow-factor in the garden centres. In fact it makes it much easier to place in the garden.

Amongst David’s recent releases have been ‘Blue Champion’ and ‘Baltic Blue’. ‘Baltic Blue’ is a very nice shade of blue. I think all the blue double primroses are lovely – and I do have quite a few different varieties – so I am looking forward to seeing how well this one does.

There is so much going on in the garden and I tend to spend time enjoying it (or working in it) and forget about adding to this but I will try harder to share photos this year.

Glad to say the bulk of my ladderwork is finished. I love the structure of the pleached hornbeam and garden rooms but it is a huge job to do the main cut of the year. Last year with the hot weather I came in every day with dreadful headaches. This year although it has been another dry summer so far we have not had the extreme heat and there have been enough overcast days to be able to get the work done in reasonable comfort. And this year I have paced myself! Every year I bless Jake Hobson for setting up his company Niwaki. I now do all the work using his ladders. Being so lightweight makes the work much easier, and their manoeuvrability is wonderful. The pleached hornbeam backs onto flower beds and I can get the ladders in without too much damage to plants.

It is the point in the year when different plant groups come to the fore. I have a lot of sanguisorba now. They are looking lovely. It is proving a very good year for penstemon. Last year I took one from my Mother’s garden. Might be the one called ‘Margery Fish’ but I am not sure. It has picked up the colours of Clematis ‘Crystal Fountain’ very nicely and is now teaming itself with a deeper violet-purple penstemon. The astilbe I have been getting from Marwood Hill are also doing well. The lily experiment has proved a success – they have come back again and are looking beautiful. So all in all not a bad year for the garden. Yes, its dry but not so bad as last year. Thank goodness!

Much hard work is under way creating new beds for peonies. Two hundred foot of box hedging has been removed. Now the soil needs improving with manure, and the edges and a new path needs to be made. There is a lot of hard work that goes into creating a garden!

A tough year for the garden last year. A very wet winter here. Then two bouts of snow, although nothing like as bad as it was for the rest of the country, and the cold Beast from the East gale which reached even this far west. Then months without rain through the summer. It is very hard for plants to be expected to cope with two such extremes. Primroses did survive the drought although they became very woody and have all needed dividing and rejuvenation. Cowslips interestingly didn’t seem to worry at all about the conditions and did very well.

The primroses flowered before the dry conditions set in and looked lovely. By the end of the summer however they had been badly set back and this year I shall be back to building numbers up again.

The heat in late June/early July caused me to stop trimming my box bushes and in particular the box parterre because newly cut leaves were getting scorched. This has meant some radical cutting back is going on now.

Some interesting things did happen in the garden however. After years of trying to get lily of the valley to establish in two different gardens, suddenly is seems I have success – but with the pink version not the normal white ones!

Meanwhile another corner of the garden is being brought in with something of a woodland feel; there are so many lovely shade and woodland plants to try.

A visit to the excellent Cedric Morris exhibition at the Garden Museum has inspired a swathe of the shrub walk. The mood in a painting of Benton End by Esther Grainger has led me to try the same sort of deep red planting with just touches of yellow and blue to lift it. Cedric had his blue meconopsis – I shall need to try other plants I think but the general feel is something to aim for.

The peonies are taking more space every year as I find more varieties to add to my peony beds. They are a delight from the first emergent growth in the depth of winter through to the autumn foliage. Early June is wonderful with new blooms to inspect every morning. This was my first variety into flower in 2018.

Now in January a walk around the garden shows hellebores looking superb. The recently released Barnhaven double primrose ‘Pink Star’ combines very nicely with hellebores and is proving a robust plant for me. Hamamelis ‘Pallida’ has been in flower for sometime and at its feet a single yellow primula with a polyanthus stem ‘June Blake’ has been in flower for even longer. It isn’t a very exciting flower, which is a pity since June and her lovely garden in Ireland deserve something more interesting, but it has been flowering continuously from late autumn which is something in its favour. Hamamelis ‘Diane’ always disappoints me since the red flowers don’t show up well and I often fail to notice when it comes into flower. I have Primula ‘Alan Robb’ planted around it. This is a double primrose I have thought to be not so strong in the past, but last summer strangely seemed to suit it and it is flourishing now. I thought its apricot orange flowers would go well with the hamamelis, and they do, or they would if the birds would stop pecking them!

Autumnal gales are upon us and blowing the last leaves off the trees. This year the lovely flame-like scarlet show of my Stewartia was over so quickly and many of the trees also lost their leaves quickly in the storms. The Liquidamber ‘Slender Silhouette’ is the exception and still looks fantastic. The foliage of herbaceous plants like hydrangea have been much better value. The quercifolia still has good red leaves, ‘Sanguine Merveille’ beautiful purple, and my new acquisition ‘Santiago’ a super scarlet. Even something like Penstemon ovatus is looking good with deep red  leaves.

Nerines have been good in the greenhouse. I am building up some nice big pots of various sarniensis varieties. Even in late November there are some good flowers open. ‘Audrey Clarke’ is looking especially striking with four good flowering stems in one pot.

The early double primroses ‘Easter Bonnet’, ‘Sunshine Suzie’ and ‘Miel’ are flowering away with gusto adding some real colour to the garden. It was such a pleasure to be weeding the new big primrose beds this year, and work in the sunshine dividing the primrose plants with the burnt sugar scent of the Cercidiphyllum ‘Rotsfuchs’ to tease me. Malcolm Pharoah, the National Collection holder of Astilbe, gave me some lovely astilbes this year and they too have had extremely good autumn foliage colour. He has really opened my eyes to these plants. There is so much more of a range than I had realised. I have planted the charming dwarf astilbe ‘Willie Buchanan’ as something of a ground cover. The ‘Isa Hall’ Malcolm gave me was a delight with delicate gracefully-arching flowers and then stunning red shades to the leaves in the autumn. So now I am branching out and have planted more varieties and am especially looking forward to seeing how some of the very tall ones do. 

Astilbe ‘Isa Hall’ autumn foliage

One of the Saxifages in flower

The other delight this year has been the Saxifraga fortunei. they are still flowering away with super mounds of frothy flowers; what a difference they make to shady woodland spots in the autumn. I hope the frosts hold off so their show continues. But what a strange year – the hellebores started flowering in August and most of them have flowers already, and not just the odd flower, they are in full bloom. Violets were in flower in September and the wild primroses in the lawn were making mowing tricky in October. My first snowdrop ‘Faringdon Double’ opened on November 20th. ‘Mrs McNamara’ is set to be the next to flower.

Now I must work fast. The peony beds have been weeded and manure spread but the primroses are waiting for their generous dollops of well-rotted manure. I need to do this before the ground gets too wet to be able to get wheelbarrows around. Then it is the planning for next year. I have many ideas about plants to add to the shrub walk. The shrubs are finding their feet and starting to look good. The Clethra and Styrax are really pleasing. I was very sad in the summer when the Pterostyrax hispida snapped on a day that wasn’t even very windy. It has been tidied back to a good bud and I hope it will overcome this setback. Now with the shrubs establishing well I can spend the winter thinking about plants to tuck in around them. 

Trying so hard this year to keep on top of annual weeds in the hope that I can reduce future crops! Maybe it will help, maybe it is wishful thinking. I think that there definitely is a correlation between how much work I have put in and how much more easy it is to do the work now. If I think back ten years when I was starting from scratch with a bare field used to cows, I know I don’t have the energy now to do the work I did then.
Weather this year has been favourable, so I have been able to get on quite well. I am starting to become more ruthless. I should have done this long ago. Fruit trees that haven’t taken properly have gone on the bonfire. I thought I would feel bad but actually I really don’t notice their absence – except to think how much better it looks! Some box that was struggling because of the wet ground has met the same fate, and more will follow. On the box front, Callum, my young neighbour comes to do some work in the garden most weeks. He is very good at trimming things – edges of flower beds, old leaves from phormium plants, that sort of thing. Recently I gave him a box ball to prune. His first effort ever to do this and he took to it like a duck to water. I foresee a future topiarist. Jake Hobson, look to your laurels! Unintentional pun there, sorry!

I am going to give Callum some plants of his own to work on from scratch and see how creative he can be with them. It is certainly interesting to watch Callum at work. Children don’t have the worries we have when we get older – he sets to with gusto. I keep reminding him “think twice, cut once”, but actually he seems to have an instinctive feel for it. One day he will cut off a bit and wish he hadn’t, but so far so good! On the left you can see him next to the finished item on his first effort. Top marks!

Such a beautiful time of year; everything so green with fresh growth and wonderful bird song. Thrushes are nesting in the pleached hornbeam. The first time that happened I was so pleased because I felt that made them official trees, now they nest there every year. It is amazing how fast a garden can get established. The primroses are nearly over now just a few late varieties in flower. This photo is of Primula ‘Tarragem Gilded Garnet’ bred by Dr Margaret Webster. The peonies are starting. Already the tenuifolia have flowered, and ‘Mai Fleuri’ an early flowering hybrid is in flower. Most wonderful of all the unpronounceable and unspellable species peony known to everyone by its nickname “Molly the witch” is in flower. It is such a fabulous pale yellow and looks so fresh.  The early foliage of the herbaceous peonies has been wonderful. The emergent growth is often a glowing red or rich purple. Now the bushes have tight buds which I am watching with glee. It seems that most things are at least two weeks early this year, so I am busy planning visits to see other people’s peonies too now.

I an weeding like mad (gardens don’t make themselves!), but there has been very little rain this year so even in my wet garden some areas are starting to be a bit dry. Last autumn I had some metal edges put round some of the flower beds as an experiment. It is really making life easier, so although expensive I shall probably add more when I can afford it!

Spring started early this year with a lot of the double primroses coming into flower as early as February. At the same time the daffodils are took over from the snowdrops; under the pleached hornbeam Narcissus lobularis is thriving. They have been seeding themselves for several years and and really starting to look good. Annoyingly they are doing better on one side of the walk than the other so it is not as balanced as I would like but they are giving the splash of colour that lifts the spirits on gloomy North Cornwall early Spring days. I suspect that old varieties of daffodils will become a new interest for me. Already I seem to be getting quite a few!  There are quite a few old varieties of daffodil growing on my hedge (Cornish hedge – a stone backed bank of earth). They seem to all be at least pre-1920 varieties although some I think it will be difficult to identify. Realising that set me off looking at other old varieties. So much fun to be had there I think! Like the primroses, it is lovely to have flowers that add colour to the early Spring.

But to come to the primroses – it is looking like a very good year for them. ’Easter Bonnet’ is always reliably early into flower. It is similar to historic ‘Quakers Bonnet’ but is a very floriferous and long flowering plant that I highly recommend. It is the longest flowering of any variety I grow. Walking round the garden, it is extremely wet but pale pink ‘Sue Jarvis’, lovely white ‘Petticoat’, ‘Sunshine Susie’ have all been in flower since February and other varieties are really getting into their stride. Super ‘Tregor Rose’ a recent Barnhaven double is also looking great. Always early it is a lovely dark red velvet colour with a deckled edge; certainly one of my favourites.
Although it is the double primroses I collect I have quite a few single primroses and this year am pleased at how they have been developing into nice big clumps. They always look better like that. ‘Dark Rosaleen’ is one of Joe Kennedy’s breeding with the lovely dark leaves his plants often have. Such a distinctive and pretty flower.

This winter I have created a new bed near the house with some beautiful hellebores from John Massey’s Ashwood Nursery. Even when the ground is too wet to walk on I can enjoy seeing them. I have been adding some of the new double primrose releases from Barnhaven  to the bed and already it is looking very pleasing.

At the end of March the BBC filmed a Plant of the Month feature in my garden on primroses with Carol Klein as the presenter. It was after a week of heavy rain and hail; the ground was so wet. I thought the cameraman was very brave kneeling in the flower beds to get the angles he needed. He could easily have disappeared from view altogether. The feature will go out on the April 7th programme on BBC2.

This has been such a busy year that I have had little time for computers. The weather has been pretty favourable. Last winter was mild, and this has been a fairly dry year for North Cornwall which has meant that quite a lot has been done in the garden. Things are definitely tidier. I have also been greatly assisted by Philip, who has taken on grass cutting for me and proved reliable and diligent.  This has meant I had more time for other things. My new primrose bed is proving to be a good position for the double primroses. I have planted those in the red and purple colour spectrums here, and am, now that I have confidence in its suitability, increasing the plantings. I have Cercidiphyllum japonicum ‘Rotfuchs’ and Hydrangea ‘Merveille Sanguine’ to give height and more interest to the area. Admittedly both are dark foliage but the feeling is coming on nicely.

My shrub walk is also slowly taking shape. I have, of course, given the best positions to the plants so I still need to solve the problem of paths in wet areas! No-one ever believes how wet my ground is until they walk over it!

My new passion for peonies is fast getting out of control. I may have restricted myself to pre-First World war varieties but I already have quite a few of those. Well, close to seventy varieties planted in beds that are meant to be mirror images although the plants may have other ideas. The Lemoine Wittmanniana hybrids from 1907, which are very early flowering have been given their own area in the shrub walk. I am really looking forward to seeing them flower. The lactiflora peonies are rapidly taking over what was originally intended to be veg garden. Much more fun I think!

A very pleasant surprise this Spring when I got plants of Primula ‘Siobhán’ from a keen lady gardener in Ireland. They are slowly bulking up, and currently in flower at the end of November. Such a pleasure to find another variety of double primrose. I am still searching diligently for varieties like ‘Prince Silverwings’ but my hopes have been dashed so many times that I think the chances of finding some of these old varieties are vanishingly slim now. Please prove me wrong!
There are still quite a few of the double primroses in flower – the stalwarts who flower the longest of all are ‘Sunshine Suzie’ and ‘Easter Bonnet’. ‘Belarina Valentine’ is becoming a real favourite too.
The planting of the shrub walk continues – it will take time for the shrubs to grow and mature but the idea starts to take shape. The newest project in the garden is the planting of two beds of peonies. Each bed is about 21 feet by 14 feet. Now this gives quite a lot of space but there are many wonderful peonies to choose from. I visited Margaret Baber’s National Collection in the Forest of Dean to try to help and narrow down my ideas. What a lovely day that was – the photographs I took are just the antidote to a rainy day too! I decided to restrict myself to pre-First World War peonies because even so there was a wide and wonderful range of beautiful flowers to choose from. The best place I could find to buy from is the French peony nursery Rivière. They have been breeding and selling peonies for generations since 1849 in fact. Not only is their range amazing but the customer service is very good. And when I received the plants the quality was astonishingly good. I now look forward to many future seasons of beautiful flowers.
But it has not all been good this year. I have in the garden a summerhouse which is a very prominent feature and visible in all the articles that have been published on the garden in the Western Morning News and Cornwall Life. It came from HSP Garden Buildings in 2010, which is not so long ago. When sitting in it in the Spring I suddenly realised that the wide horizontal glazing bars were concave and when I touched them I realised they had rotted. Although the summerhouse looks lovely it has been nothing but trouble. Firstly almost immediately after it had been put up one of the window panes filled with condensation. A workman was sent to replace it. Within a month of it being replaced the same pane again filled with condensation. I rang to report this and was told “oh! that is not acceptable” and was told that the appropriate person would be in touch. I never heard anymore.
Then I found that the blocks carrying the hooks to secure the doors pull straight off. They were only glued on and had tiny pins to hold them. Certainly not sufficient for purpose. I had to have my carpenter secure the blocks with a proper screw. Next the lock rusted up completely so a key would not go into the keyhole. I had to get the lock replaced. Now the glazing bars are like marshmallow. I contacted the company and was told they would organise for the doors to be replaced and I would hear from them with a date within days – it is now months with no word. So now I have a dilemma. It was obviously a very expensive mistake buying the summerhouse. I could have probably had a new mid-range summerhouse every year for the cost of the HSP one. With the degree of rot in the doors they will not last much longer – so what to do? How long can I keep chasing them?