Garden day

When you travel around a lot for work it's really good to be able to spend a Bank Holiday Sunday at home. After a couple of hours giving the bathroom a deep clean, I spent most of the rest of the day in the garden, digging up couch and preparing areas for our new purchases, including this glorious blue anemone which will be placed in one of the patio beds. I carried on until my back declared that it had had enough, and then I pottered more gently, sowing seeds. 

The sun was warm, and our new sitting spot was really pleasant, with excellent views across masses of tulips, which do surprisingly well considering the awful clay soil we have. Some of my time was spent making a start on the prairie bed, but having re-acquainted myself with just how wet and clayey the soil is, we're now going for more of a shaded fen meadow, with clumps of Sanguisorba, Angelica, Eupatorium, Silene flos-cuculi,  Deschampsia cespitosa 'Goltau' and maybe some ferns. I'm really quite looking forward to it...

After another frosty start it became warm enough for a variety of insects to emerge, including the first orange-tip butterfly ( a remarkably small male) and a pair of green-veined whites,who immediately got on with procreating, much to the orange-tip's annoyance. It looks as though the weather's finally turning warmer. so hopefully we'll see  a lot more insect activity over the next couple of weeks.