Cyclamen

I noticed last week that the first cyclamen had started to flower in my husband's 'white bed' amid the variegated mint and vinca; the white sweet-smelling dianthus and an alpine whose name I have forgotten that spreads in a mat of silvery leaves.  The cyclamen grew through the naturalised wild strawberry that, still flowering and fruiting, he uses as a filler.  They were variegated also, petals held upward in tones of white and pink making me think of angels' wings on a medieval triptych.

Once we tried cyclamen by our front porch.  We had a big display of them with winter pansies for my sixtieth birthday, sourced from the garden centre of my very distant cousins at Tarleton.  Sadly as is the way with cyclamen, not just theirs I hasten to add, they shrank in following years.  I planted one in a side border without success.  The next batch of 'rescued' cyclamen from a superstore behaved in just the same way.  So, after one year overwintering these at the back of the garden in tubs, my husband moved them to his white bed, where he has also lodged the penstemons he has propagated.   The soil is enriched with our own leaf mould and raised above the water table.  The cyclamen are improving.  I even have hopes of the last translocated survivor from my cousins.  Some plants do better in cultivated ground.

Spring Bulbs: autumn season

As we emptied the greenhouse of tomato plants and transferred the geraniums there for overwintering I wondered if I would become an older person from the south.  Last week my husband filled up all our terracotta containers and others with a mixture of sand from my family, compost and well rotted manure and I proceeded to bury a mixture of tulips - a gift from a friend in Rawtenstall, and the daffodils we had dried out over the summer.  These latter failed to flower in the first season, but we dug them up and are giving them a second chance to flower by the front porch.  Then my husband netted everything against the curiosity of squirrels. 

And I saw myself, four years ago, back in Redbridge, planting out saved daffodils and new bulbs purchased for our customer from the superstore, and my husband ingeniously netting containers with whatever came to hand.  As he mowed our small lawn avoiding our two apple trees I remembered the great expanse he used to tackle for this widowed lady, the disused vegetable plot and the fallen apples towards the back in the grass.  I tidied up our neat square after him and and uttered a prayer that I might never get too infirm to attend to my borders or leave them, bereft of flowers, invaded by grass.