Six on Saturday: When is an Empty Pot Not an Empty Pot?

When it is full of newly-planted bulbs, of course!

It has been a most satisfactory day in the garden today, the sort of day typical more of summer than autumn, when numerous tasks have been carried out and crossed off the To-Do list. Completing bulb planting was just one of them, following on from planting lots of tulips in pots earlier in the week. The above pots, part of the blue & white borders, were filled with three different shades of muscari, with some trailing violas and blue primula added later, and I am as pleased as everyone else to have finally completed bulb planting for this year.

Whilst working at the bottom of the garden, I finished bubble-wrapping the greenhouse, a task that never takes as long as I expect it to, and which can be largely completed even when it’s raining as most of the insulation is inside. Due to the way we built-in the staging, some of the bubblewrap is easier to apply to the outside, and still manages to survive the ravages of winter weather.

The pots with labels you can see just inside the greenhouse door include some with bulbs potted up for sale when we open the garden in February and named snowdrops – some from bulbs I twin-scaled in 2022, and some from a Hardy Plant Society benefactor who bequeathed her collection to members of the HPS Galanthophile section after her death. For a nominal sum to cover postage and packing, I received 10 random named snowdrops, most of which I didn’t already have, and over the last few days I have noticed some are beginning to show signs of new life, like G ‘Daphne’s Scissors’ below:

During the week, I all but finished pruning the climbing roses, creating bags and bags of prunings that necessitated a trip to our recycling centre as our ‘green bin’ was