The mole is still busy making more molehills, one even appeared each morning of the opening. This morning when I was having my usual 6am walk round the garden (with mug of tea) I met our hedgehog who seemed very surprised to see me! While people were having their tea and cakes when they visited us, they were amazed at how tame the birds were. Our tame robin thoroughly enjoyed all the cake crumbs that he was given, a young great spotted woodpecker carried on feeding from the bird feeder only a few feet away from where everyone was enjoying their tea and a buzzard put on a lovely display until it was chased away by 2 crows. They said it was a Nature Reserve as well as a lovely garden.

Everyone was amazed at the size of the Hostas here and the fact that the leaves have no holes in them. My advice was to encourage the blackbirds and thrushes into the garden along with a hedgehog then they shouldn’t have a problem, the slugs and snails should soon be eaten up.

The roses, clematis, peony, oriental poppies and iris all looked wonderful, from now on I will just have to keep up with the dead-heading and remove any weeds that dare to appear.

A couple of areas have been earmarked for improvement, we had been waiting until after our opening, so now we can remove a couple of shrubs and a tree that are getting too big and can then extend a small woodland area round to join on to the more boggy area. I can visualise drifts of candelabra primulas, ferns, hostas, meconopsis and astilbe, can’t wait to get started!!

In spite of this the early flowers have looked lovely, when we got back from Sierra Leone the small woodland looked wonderful with thousands of snowdrops- the Hellebores which normally flower at the same time didn’t like the freezing temperatures and flowered beautifully a month later. Lots of other Spring bulbs followed the Snowdrops, then the Primroses, Narcissus & Bluebells took over. It was certainly worth going for a little walk each day just to see what had popped up overnight.

My passion, apart from Snowdrops & Hellebores, is Meconopsis and I am nursing about 200 seedlings, having just planted them out in their final places.50 were grown from seed which I bought in Canada at the Metis Garden (fantastic garden) and the other 150 from the seed of a plant I bought of Meconopsis “Lingholm”. While everyone else here will be hoping for a hot dry summer, I’m afraid I will be hoping for it to be cool & drizzly so that they will feel as if they are still at home in Tibet! Now each day I am searching for flower buds on my plants — do I let them flower in their first year? – I have read so much conflicting advice. At the moment I don’t think I would have the heart to cut the flower spikes off but would have to sacrifice one plant to collect seed to try and grow more plants.

At the moment we are frantically trying to get our garden ready for our opening for the National Garden Scheme next month (June 12/13) — non stop weeding. We thought we were on top of the weeds but after the last lot of rain the weeds are popping up everywhere again – it never stops!