April 2025 – the season for growing kitchens

What with one thing and another this spring has been light on gardening and heavy on furniture moving and working out the best way to do the washing up in the shower. Gardens being gardens though, things seem to have got on without me and progress has been made.

April started off looking like this

Ch ch ch changes

Planted a curry plant in the back border and a purple/red salvia in the east facing bed (where the slugs attack the leaves with gusto but it keeps flowering anyway). Put a white aster in the shady bed by the fatsia and a couple of shade lovers in the east facing bed where they will be overlooked by next door’s monster shrubs (a brunnera macrophylia silver spear and a hylomecon japonica which promises orange flowers like a poppy.)

Successes

Month got underway with a pond full of toadspawn and sightings of two newts. The pond generally looks great. The grasses have filled out around it and the flag irises and other aquatic plants are busily doing their own thing with no input from me. There are flowers on the bay trees, new growth on the astilbe – which might have heard my mutterings about replacing it and pulled its socks up, The white skimmia and the euphorbias are fantastic. The acer has survived its change of pot and went from this

to this

in the space of the month.

Lots of good ground cover from the dog violets and wild strawberries, creeping Jenny and woodruff. New growth on the lemon verbena , the valerian is starting to flower. Lots of wild garlic. Flower spikes on the acanthus (though, spoiler alert – the plants are overwhelmed by mildew and most of the leaves had to be removed by mid-May)

Hmms

At the start of the month there was no sign of growth on the epimedium (which didn’t sprout back until late May and was immediately slugged into submission). Tried replanting the tuber of the Bishop of Landaff, which was lovingly saved over winter, but no signs of life by end of May, I fear the Bish is no more. No aliums this year or any flowers on the geum (although lots of leaves and what look like flower stems). Both were flowering well this time last year – do I blame the slugs or the weather?