Galanthus nivalis

I’ve got a day off today. Ostensibly so that I can attend a dental appointment, but I could probably have got across from work if pushed. However I do feel long overdue a day off, and I have a ton of annual leave accumulated, so I won’t feel unduly guilty.

I seem to have landed pretty lucky, it is a lovely day. Clean and bright, as only a spring day can be. The garden is starting to bud and grow. Well truth be told much of it never seemed to stop growing. The primroses have never stopped, but the snowdrops are now up and the crocuses are now following them. I’ve naturalised some snowdrops in my front lawn as it never gets walked on, and the first cut is actually pretty late, so the snowdrops will have died back before I need to give it a cut. I’ve put in some crocuses round the back garden, just tucking them in round the sides of the lawn, in all the hard to reach bits that the mower never reaches to. They are now popping up, little colourful surprises.

Elsewhere in the garden stuff is starting to bud, and some stuff isn’t but I’m sure that in the fullness of time it will all sort itself out. Gardening is always a rough art. You never get it right all the time, but just labour away, and chalk up enough triumphs to keep you motivated and enough failures to stop you getting complacent.

I do enjoy having the house to myself, a little peace and quiet. At the weekend we went to Culross and there was a huge patch of snowdrops up by the Abbey, so deep they seemed to be stacked up on each other, so deep you could smell them. I suppose they had simply found the right spot, and been left to their own devices for year upon year, and in their quiet way just added on a few more each year, until they formed a snowy mountain. Often just leaving things to their own devices makes for a far better outcome than people ever could. I don’t suppose anyone would ever think to accumulate quite so many plain white galanthus nivalis, or smooth the rough edges off their stonework, or train ivy across an old wall, but left alone these things happen. I like the sort of texture that comes with age, nature seems a lot better at gently sorting things out than we are. I left some lesser celandine in my front garden, a stocky little thing with bulbous roots and little yellow flowers, and slowly it has spread out, gently extending its boundaries, some unshowy flowers, never choking out anything else, but just quietly filling up some gaps that I’ve not found planting for yet. None of my introduced plants seems to show the same steady progress, they tend towards the invasive, the plain stationery, not dying but not doing much else, or the temperamental, happy until something unexpected like winter comes along.

Gardening just seems to be a direction of travel, you never actually get there, you just keep asking new questions, trying out something else. Every year the garden seems a bit different, the big stuff gets bigger, stuff gets its roots down and accelerates on, the failures quietly melt away into the compost and back to soil.