RIP box balls.

Yes indeed my two lovely box balls have succumbed to blight. I am very sad about this as I loved them but as also they are quite expensive to lose.
Box blight has no known cure, is caused by fungus and will have been brought on by the excessively damp Winter here, it spreads only to other box (buxus) so at least everything else in my garden is safe from it. Thank goodness I don't have a whole knot garden.

 You can see them here looking healthy and happy, but they became:

The two little ones seem safe for now, but I will keep an eye on them.

I liked them because they marked a good spot on either side of the grass path and it looks a little bare without them.

So no more box, I can't afford to lose expensive plants like that so I am now looking for alternatives.
I am told Hebe is a nice alternative with the advantage of lovely flowers once a year. It can also be shaped nicely to look like a ball too. I could try yew, but it, too is rather expensive and I don't want it to grow excessively large. I have sweet box (sarcococca confusa) already in the garden and don't want any more although the winter smell is wonderful. I did even wonder at a couple of hydrangeas as I could ditch them in a dark corner when they get to that stage that I dislike so much (yet others seem to love) but they too are rather expensive and I really want something that I can keep there year round. So hebe is at the top of the list, but I am more than prepared to think about any other suggestions. Something I could topiarize (is that even a word?) would be nice..

A little touch of Winter joy.

It is cold and grey (every day is grey) here again and I have no desire to go outside at all.

So it is lucky that today is a short 'indoors' post.

It's the first time I have forced hyacinths and I am delighted with the results. I bought four lots of three last September, planted them up as instructed and put them in a cupboard in the garage and forgot about them. A couple of weeks ago they were all ready in different ways to come out so they came into a cool room on the windowsill. One shot forward, another was slow and steady and the remaining two are slow coaches that will get there in the end.

This delightful pink is filling the room with it's heavenly sent (although my mother has warned me that this smell will turn to cat pee eventually). A small glass bowl that I did a mercury glass spray paint experiment on last October just happens to fit the pot perfectly which is lucky.

These are the remaining ones. It looks, to my untrained eye, that they are all going to be ready at different times, which is a lucky coincidence as this might give me a continuous supply for a while. One is white, one is the deep purply blue and the other light blue.

Lovely.

Finding the Colour

After my last post, bemoaning the garden in winter I thought that I would try and, well if not celebrate it, then at least look for the good stuff. Okay, so as I stood there wondering what to photograph there wasn't very much to show, but there was a bit of 'promise' here and there.

When the two small conifers I had in the front door pots finally succumbed and died I decided to do some winter pots. The holly in the left pot is female and the one in the right is male, so at least the female will always have red berries. If they ever get too big (or me too bored) I will replant them in the garden itself in the future. Lower down in the pot are a selection of pink tulips for Spring and something else (and although I wrack my brains, I can't for the life of me remember the other bulbs I put in, but I know it was something.)

On the left here is a camellia that my father gave me for Christmas, it is called a Preston Rose which seemed quite apt (as Preston is near here). A gorgeous deep pinky purple flower and there are loads of buds on it. On the right is my rhododendron - very small still, but gave me quite a good pink display last year. Rhododendrons aren't everyones favourite, but since I was a small boy and happened on an enormous bank of them in bloom I have never forgotten how captivated I was, so I had to have one, even if it is a small dwarf one.

These snowdrops don't look much right now, but they will do soon, always a pleasure to see them arrive.

Now these really don't look like anything much, but they will, oh yes, they will. The pots on the left all are packed full of cream tulips and are going to look wonderful en masse like that. The strange looking thing on the right is my tin bath, also packed full of tulips (pink? red? no idea, can't remember. It is like I forget immediately once I put them in, but will be a lovely lovely surprise when the time comes). I added some mulch and wrapped fleece around it because the tulips were already poking their heads through and we are still likely to get some bad frost/snow/end of the World weather yet so I was a bit concerned by their exuberance.

So nice things do exist out there, we just have to find it and celebrate it.