Roads to Joy

When you move, in my limited experience, you tend to leave one garden in place, and pick up the next in your new residence. I have heard that some people so love their gardening efforts that they uplift everything from the site they’re vacating to transplant into the new one. But that’s not the normal sort of behaviour, I’m sure. No, gardens are the often unsung features of a new home that somehow don’t make it into the real estate valuation. But a garden is particularly important to us.

We left a garden back in Sparty that we’d nurtured from the time it was a pasture. Filled with borders, beds, vegetable plots, trees and shrubs and raised beds in the polytunnel, it was our treasure. But of course, we took nothing with us except for a few potted specimens. We had to say goodbye to all that, but the joy is that we’re saying hello to a new-to-us garden that is full of surprises.

In particular, we’re delighted with the hellebores and the peonies that seem to be sprouting up everywhere! The new garden is full of bulbs that seem to be saying a carpet welcome to the new season.

The great joy of this new adventure is that we can watch and wait as new flowering plants appear. Apart from dealing with frost-killed individuals, we are confident that patience and attentiveness will repay this year-long vigil. Not a single blossom do we want to miss in any misplaced hurry to finesse this or that section. No, best to see what’s actually here, and to enjoy the display that’s due to arrive.

But we are, incidentally, nurturing a bunch of ten hellebore plant plugs acquired just as we left the North Pennines, which have over-wintered and are ready to put out somewhere. We may be able to add to the bountiful collection of these intriguing plants when we find a suitably bare space. That, on the other hand, may be quite a challenging find.

Meanwhile, it’s great fun to watch the plants grow and bloom, and so the daily joys abound around us.