A day of hope, hellebores, snowdrops and a surprise

 

During the summer,  our old ash tree in the garden  needed attention. After a couple of storms and a week of windy weather, quite a few big branches had snapped and fallen to the ground.

 

 The tree  urgently needed attention as a few larger branches higher up had died. If one of those crashed to the ground, and we happened to be in the way, we would be brown bread. Dead .(It's cockney rhyming slang)

That wasn't an appealing prospect, so after permission from the local council, we called in Tom,  the tree surgeon.

 

 

When I came back from work that day, Tom and his men had put the logs just in front of the piggery on the right hand side of the photo above. And there they stayed until November. Well, it saved me having to weed around there...

 



But by then , I was worrying about my snowdrop and daffodil bulbs under the soil and all those logs. So one dreary Sunday in late November I spent hours moving them all a few yards away under the box hedging...

Boo, Eric and Winnie were very curious..scratching and digging. They were admonished .Would my bulbs survive, I wondered.

So this morning it was wonderful to walk to the bottom of the garden and see the snowdrops and daffodils and the promise of spring.

And elsewhere ,snowdrops were showing their pure little flowers which mean so much at this time of the year.

And at the shady place at the side of our cottage, the hellebores were there to greet me, just like they have every January for the last twelve or so years. I bought one plant from a small nursery a few miles away....it cost £2.50 I recall...what great value for all those years of the pleasure of seeing them at such a bleak time of the year.

And then, the biggest surprise of all was outside the French doors of the dining room. There's a stone planter there filled with lavender and pinks which I planted up about  fourteen years ago. One of them was in flower...really!

So in the space of a five minute stroll around the garden, my mood had transformed. It's amazing how restorative a splash of colour, and a hint and the hope of the spring and summer to come, actually is.