Last week I got six bags of compost. I have started putting it on top of the soil starting alongside the house. The soil there is very grey almost like cement and what a difference it makes putting the compost down. It is just a thin layer and I just throw it down a roughly smooth it where needed. I'm hoping that as well as making it look better it will gradually improve the soil. At the moment the clay is very dry and hard on the surface.

I transplanted my rosemary into a container. This is a plant I bought the summer before last. Over the previous winter it got very damp and was suffering. When I moved it to a bigger pot last summer it had very few roots. Now is a completely different story, the roots were wrapped around the pot very tightly and although I tried …

This is an update to the post describing the new red leaves on a varegated bush. I speculated that it could be Pieris japonica also known as the lily of the valley bush. I was unsure as they have flowers in the spring too and I didn't see any.

I saw one when out walking, it was quite a large shrub, much larger than mine and it had lots of flowers.

I took another look at mine, and there are indeed flowers which I had missed as they are low down and somewhat hidden. Oh look just noticed that there are some ant crawling over the flowers!

The shrub I previously thought was a dogwood has its first flower. It is really rather lovely. From the flower it is much more likely to be a Kerria japonica and probably the variety 'Pleniflora'. The tree is covered in buds so this is going to be quite a show.

The main event of the month was the daffodils which are still in flower. Crocuses had some flowers, but were a disappointment and the muscari were starting to fully flower as the month closed. Other things continued to grow, and there were a couple of new appearances yet to be identified.

Daffodils

The first daffodil flower opened on the 13th, and they remained throughout the rest of the month. There is a main patch which is doing well, and some isolated ones in different parts of the garden.

Some mini daffodils with complex double (or treble or more!) flowers beneath the hazel put up three flowers, which is not many given the number of plants there.

Crocus

My own crocuses that I had in a container flowered well, but the ones in the garden were a disappointment as there was only three or four flowers. First crocus out on the …

I've tried growing basil a few times, its never been particularly successful. Here we are at about 11 days, and there are a couple of seedlings up.

Nothing much to distinguish these seedlings, small round leaves.

First petunia seedlings, this is about day 11. There is very little that is distinctive about these seedlings, very small rounded leaves.

There are a lot of shoots appearing in various places. At first I thought they were from the Vinca, because I first saw them in that area. However they are now appearing all around the garden. Today I decided that they may be Lily of the valley and another search has turned up a picture on Marks veg plot (about half way down that page) which pretty much confirms it for me.

A close up:

A large patch of them:

One of the shrubs that I do not know the name of has some bright red new growth. Probably leaves, but could be flowers. Searching around it could be a lily of the valley bush or Pieris or it might not be. If it is, then the red growth will be leaves and it will have probably white flowers, that somewhat resemble those of lily of the valley. So we will see how it develops...