Spring 2018

This is my kind of Easter activity. How many plants / weeds can be identified? (this is also on Facebook so you can comment if you want)

with labels added

I think this must be the largest hairy bittercress I've ever seen. The long spiky bits are the seed pods. There is a tiny hairy bittercress in the centre of the pic above.

this is the first green alkanet I've seen this Spring, one of my favourite flowers

forsythia is magnificent for a brief period in the Spring

Hampstead Heath was a rather disappointing place to see plants this week (ground too trodden on by people and their dogs) but around Kenwood House I saw a few small bulbs including this chinodoxa. I love the intense colour of the closed buds.

close-up or one of the chinodoxa flowers

view from Hampstead Heath, Post Office Tower far right

best buys from the garden centre (free from the skip!)

I bought some plants from Peter Nyssen, Bear's discovered the nepeta (catnip). Between the cold and snow recently and Bear, they aren't looking too good.

a couple more colours of polyanthus are blooming, and that blue "zebra" one I couldn't resist from the garden centre

angelica I bought from the garden centre last year as a "wildflower", good value, it's a biennial so will bloom this year after last year's planting

the cyclamen coum has survived the slugs, campanula and other seedlings near it

I plant out my previously forced hyacinth bulbs, they do bloom again but in a very subdued way. The garden withoutdoors overlaps with the garden withindoors

I now have a huge pile of spent hyacinth bulbs to plant in the garden. I think it's warm enough now - for the moment - before the latest cold snap due before Easter.

bulbs want to grow! these tiny bulbs were on the patio or somewhere last autumn and got accumulated in this pot, I had forgotten about them and this spring started doing what they do