February Gardening

What a lovely day it is for going out in the garden! I didn’t check the weather and chose rainy yesterday to pay a visit to the garden I look after. Not surprisingly, I only lasted a couple of hours before I was was soaked through and the ground was so muddy that I was making more mess than doing good! Today would’ve been the wiser choise. Either way, I have been outside in the sunshine today and noticed lots of signs that spring is on the way.

I have a little patch of Bergenia Elephant’s Ears in my garden, and I was pleased to find that they’ve got a few lovely bright pink buds nestled in their foliage so it won’t be long until they’re flowering. I think they’re such great plants; they flower early, are happy in shade, they flower every year, the foliage is evergreen and they’re easy to grow. Any plant that can offer that many benefits with virtually zero maintenance is a winner in my book.

Snowdrops are flowering and there are lots of others just starting to peep through. I identified some as Tulips and Daffodils, although I find it’s sometimes hard to tell when you weren’t there to see what they were the year before. I saw a Lilac with leaf buds that look like they’re just about to burst too.

I also noticed something interesting that I didn’t know and I’m going to look into it in further detail at some point. One of my neighbours has a yellow-berried variety of Pyracantha that’s still absolutely covered in berries. Whereas the red-berried Pyracantha outside my house has been completely stripped bare by birds (not that I mind, I was happy to provide berries for the birds while it was snowy). Do the birds not like yellow berries? If not, is it a good idea to choose a yellow-berried variety over a red? I’d never thought of that before.

Otherwise, in the the large farm-house garden I look after and visit once every two weeks, February is what I think of as ‘the calm before the storm’. It’s the last chance to go out and think “there’s not much to do” before everything starts growing incredibly quickly and you suddenly have way to much to do.

But, there were a few bits and bobs that I got round to doing after meaning to for months. I cut back a very overgrown climbing Jasmine. I must have not got around to it last year because it was taking over the pergola it was growing on. I think that job should’ve really been done last autumn just after it had finished flowering but at the time I was too occupied by the leaves that had dropped everywhere.

I tidied up some Stachys (Lamb’s Ear) too. I had already cut them back in the winter, but they had hung onto a few leaves that had gone all grey and dead. Picking the dead leaves out was fiddly so I switched to a soft plastic rake and raked right through them, which seemed to tidy them up nicely (and quickly!).

I forked over the gaps in the herbaceous beds to soften the soil up. After it’s been sitting dormant and bare over winter it starts to look tatty and you can see where it’s uneven. Give the ground a light going-over with a border fork and it completely refreshes it!