March the old saying was “ many weathers ” but we had good weather for a change and got a huge amount finished in the garden and of course the big bonus along with the magic word “ summertime ”from the 29th was that extra hour in the evenings and the darkness at 4.45 pm days are behind us !
Last year in Croatia I saw a neighbour pruning his olive trees with a battery operated little hand saw … back in Clonmel Pat Cleere supplied me with a Stihl unit and I can honestly say it is the best piece of kit since the sliced pan and cuts effortlessly through those large thumb size branches that up to now I needed an old fashioned large hand saw for … usually I got Snezana to follow me around with the battery powered chainsaw when I was hard pruning the willows but it was a real pain for both of us as she hated being dictated to and I hated being dependant on her for the use of the chainsaw and this way I can plough away through the spring pruning at my own pace … it has transformed my pruning … and it would also be perfect for anyone with difficulty using normal secateurs where some force is required … a delicate way of saying that age diminishes our strength and arthritis is calling !
We have a lot of golden willows that I plant up with cuttings every year as our type of ground suits them but they can become unwieldy looking and clumpy over time so about seven years ago after a visit to Carl Wilde’s wonderful garden in the Burren where he had topped three willows into standards I thought this was a brilliant way of making a real architectural statement out of what can be a very untidy tree and have cropped our willows on a yearly basis each March … you need to be pretty methodical with this as they grow amazingly quickly and skip a season cutting and they get out of hand .
I could of course make things easy for myself and start cutting back in early January but I like to enjoy the coloured stems of the willows as long as possible in the dull days of winter so I delay cutting back until March so it always ends up at this time of year in a race to get them all cut before too much growth has started otherwise the willow is damaged … it is a compromise also with the miscanthus grasses trying to enjoy the winter display as long as possible … not an easy choice this cutting back !
Rules sometimes are meant to be broken and the gardening rule is to replicate nature and plant in uneven numbers and of course five silver birch would have been better in the raised planting area outside the back door however the space just wasen’t there and while three trees would have fitted the rule but four looked great !
This winter here was dark and gloomy and the silver birch never looked better as they lift up the darkest space and while the variety jacquemontii is expensive , it is a magnificent show stopper .
A good March day with the sun out is a real joy in the garden , the shrubs and trees are in bud and about to leaf up and you know that good weather is coming for the next eight months .
I always judge that spring has finally arrived when the golden willow in the front garden opens it’s leaves .
Mary Skelly who owned the Kilcoran Garden Centre retired and sold up last September and will be sadly missed for her selection of well maintained plants . Mary was a proper plants woman who always maintained a marvellous selection across the seasons and I know the local gardening community will wish her well in retirement .
A new company bought Mary’s garden centre , closed it for three months and reopened in February after extensive renovations in every area with new structures and additions over the entire site and we paid our first visit last week .
No doubt it is modern with proper heating and mostly all areas are covered in from the elements and you can shop and browse in comfort through a huge selection of neo antique furniture and accessories for the house and garden .
However modern whether one likes it or not garden centres are now lifestyle stores with the addition of plants and it is a sign of the times that people are less interested in plants and actual gardening .
I found my walk around depressing and for the first time in my life I came away from a garden centre without buying anything however as Snezana pointed out normally there would be six or seven people shopping there when Mary was the owner now there was over a hundred shopping yesterday and the expanded car park was full .
New pots
We have enough pots in the garden already but when some exceptional ones become available well we always have room although generally now any new pots have to be large statement types and in March Clonmel Garden Centre got in some really nice ones from Shanghai that looked very similar to the clay rice wine pots we saw last November during our visit to the Jinfeng Winery in Shanghai and both their size and colour looked great .
I wrote about these rice wine pots in November “Some gorgeous garden statues and ornaments to die for that would do very well in the garden here and as for pots well we were in a winery outside Shanghai called Jinfeng Wine that is famous throughout Asia for rice wine and they ship it in hand made clay pots about a metre high which are then brought back to the factory and reused over and over again and we saw one vintage of 2003 … literally thousands of pots waiting in the warehouse to be reused and if these vintage pots were available in Europe they would sell out in hours .”
So, new pots and first we needed to place the pots in the garden and two places immediately suggested themselves , one was added to a group of four in the new patio area of the front garden and the other two were added to a single large pot in the immediate back garden . Filling them took a lot of earth and as usual I dig out / renew the edges of the paths in the Lower Field and use this which is heavy clayey soil and perfect for filling before topping up with good compost … digging out the path edges also helps with the drainage as the surface water is channelled into this and runs off .
I planted the new pots up in full sun positions with what will be their main plants , all evergreen … bergenias , geranium biokovo and geranium nudosum all of which I had growing on here from cuttings last October and then added some ferns and sedums for growth around the base of the feature plants , topping each of the pots off with pea gravel for a nice finish which will also help with drainage and keep weeds down … later in May I will tuck in bedding annuals such as white allysum , blue lobelis and some nasturtiums which I love for their foliage and trailing habit … with big pots like these I no longer use large plants as centre pieces as I like the large pots to dominate and not be taken over by the planting .
Trip to Mexico revisited
I mentioned I had brought home a cedarwood hand carving of the Mayan King of Palenque however I have to be honest and say that I had no clue who the mask represented when I first saw it although I remember when Erich Von Daniken’s book the Chariot of the Gods first came out in 1969 it grabbed the headlines with his claims at what he claimed was a representation of a space ship alien carved on a 7th century sarcophagus of a Mayan King , Kamal Kin , but I was looking through this fabulous four storey shop in Merida which dealt in quality Mayan carpets and hand carved items when I saw this one mask that grabbed my attention immediately , the only one of it’s kind in the shop and asked what it was … to be told that is Kamal Kin , the most famous Mayan King of all and that the original was made of jade in 658 AD and was now in the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City … it looked other worldly and a bit in your face ugly … but I liked it , went away for a day to think about it , knew I loved it , came back to the shop and did a deal … as a bonus when I got it back home Snezana loved it at first sight !
For years before my visit to Mexico last month I have been fascinated by the giant stone Olmec heads discovered in the 1930’s on the Gulf of Mexico near Vera Cruz … weighing about forty tons and fifteen feet tall there have been eighteen stone heads discovered and these date to about 1000 BC …three of these giant heads are in the Anthropology Museum of Mexico City so a great thrill for me to actually get to see these in reality .
Actually these were the first exhibits I went to see in the museum on my first visit , huge and much larger in reality and the more you stood and looked at them ,the more enigmatic and other worldly they appeared but there was a protective guard rail around each head which of course you could step over if you wanted however I have been down that route before in museums especially at the first Tutankhamun exhibition in London back in 1972 and it ends in arrest and ejection from the museum so no go there on that one thank you very much !
However there was one in the garden behind the museum which I thought was terrific in that you could walk right up to it and touch it (when the guards weren’t looking !) and I must have taken over thirty photos of it with me in various selfies until on my last visit I wrapped an arm around it … again when the guard wasen’t looking … and it f..king moved and only then did I realise it was made of heavy duty resin and what I was loving from 1000 BC was actually fake and made in 2024 !!
Chac Mool statues
I have a vague memory of seeing photos off these unusual reclining statues of the Mayan Rain God from years ago before I visited but seeing them close up made a huge impression on me and perhaps it is the uncompromising stare , almost defiant glare really and the fact that the head is turned so awkwardly from the main body … my son Diarm on the Family Whatsapp group immediately declared that’s David , his second older brother when I sent the first photo !
Chac Mool statues were present on most Mayan sites but are almost all now in museums across Mexico … sacrificial victims hearts were left in the little receptacle on the reclining statues so these are no benign deities .
Finally Frida Kahlo’s house where she was born and where she lived all her life made a huge impression on me as it was filled with her clothes , furniture , painting studio , bedroom and even her ashes resting forever on her dressing table in an original two thousand year old Toltec vase .
The garden was beautiful and overall the whole impression was so personal you felt you knew here and unlike her portraits which I always felt made her slightly fearsome looking but experiencing her house and garden made her seem gentler and vulnerable .
Swimming in a Cenote in the Yucatan
The huge deep fresh water pools are dotted all over Yucatan and were formed millions of years ago by meteorites hitting the earth and they were regarded as sacred by the Mayans who believed them to be gateways to the underworld . A lot of the cenotes are on the surface but the one Kevin and I visited near Chichen Izla was about thirty feet underground and reached by a narrow rickety old iron stairs and quite difficult to access , health and safety are not big deals in the Yucatan and because I still had the image in my memory of crocodiles lurkng around cenotes I was quite happy to take a photo and get back up the stairs however Kev although equally nervous went in for a swim around the stalactites and again I thought OK got the photo been there etc. and made for the stairs but at the top I said f..k it I will regret it later if I don’t go in as well … these photos are worth it … plus he would never let me live it down later when it would be a case of when did you swim in the cenote Dad !
What no Pyramids for a special mention ?
Situated thirty miles outside modern Mexico City despite my huge expectations I found the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon strangely without atmosphere and to me they just sat there , big monolithic structures with no hint of mystery .
The Mayan temples in Yucatan on the other hand were totally different , enigmatic , beautiful and impressive … but visually striking as they are there is no getting away from the fact that these structures throughout their history like the later Aztec structures were also built for human sacrifice and this is the pervading gruesome feeling you get at these sites or so it was for me .
Garden in March
We decided that the front garden on the left hand side needed a makeover but despite various ideas none was a runner so a sharp pruning was decided on and for the past few years I was having second thoughts of the cordylines and thought they were no longer exotic looking … rather that they had got long and leggy so we reduced the height on two off shoots and then thinned out some mountain ash , rhus sumac , that had definitely got leggy … this left more westerly light into the area and maybe we don’t need to do anything else for this year .
Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever cut down healthy cordyline trees but gardens mature before you know it and drastic action is required and also taste changes and now the garden demands more light filtering through .
Next day Snezana cleared undergrowth in the immediate back garden and asked about cutting down a mature viburnum shrub … now for some reason she has generally issued a Petrovska fatwa on viburnum over the past few years , positively hates them … but when I looked at the area she had already cleared I could see it would work better if the viburnum went and it would also open up a lovely little grove facing south west which would allow lots of filtered light through the silver birch and be a really nice sheltered place to sit out in … in the meantime it also allowed a perfect site for a lovely acer palmatum atropurpereum we bought last week in Clonmel Garden Centre .
Acer palmatum purpereum is a fabulous Japanese maple tree that will grow slowly to a maximum of two metres high and wide and which has beautiful delicate bluey leaves , a real winner of a small tree that every garden no matter how small should have space for … pricy at 90 euros depending on the size but worth every penny … needs a little shade and will not do well in full sun , normal soil and most importantly needs shelter from winds that ravage the leaves so is a tree for an established area and will not thrive as a stand alone specimen tree … known as an umbellifier tree which means it does well partially in the shelter of taller trees .
Always a bit of a rush at the end of March to get all bare rooted trees planted and I thought I was finished when Lynda from Clonmel Garden Centre rang to say that they were selling off some two metres high beeches and oak bare rooted at half price to save themselves potting them up and was I interested … I was there just after Lynda put the phone down and came away with ten beech and eight oak … never look a bargain or a gift horse in the mouth !
I hadn’t any particular planting places in mind so had a lovely day strolling around in the Lower Field and woodland area with a wheel barrow full of trees asking myself would this spot be enhanced with an oak or a beech tree and found homes and suitable soil areas for all eighteen trees .
That is one of the rewards of gardening , a nice day strolling around , a few choice trees to plant and all day to do it !
March sees some beautiful wild flowering plants in the garden here especially those that like water such as my three particular favourites , the marsh marigold , the american skunk cabbage and the tiny lesser celandine .
The marsh marigold or Caltha palustris is an evergreen waterside plant widely available in garden centres but often overlooked and is easily split every year after flowering and I have spread it throughout the garden where it increases and flowers every year … a really worthwhile plant that I love .
The Lesser Celandine is a totally wild plant that chooses damp places to self seed to a point that some people regard it as an invasive weed … not by me and I regard it as essential and love to see it popping up in new places and even in pots … it flowers in March with little dandelion like flowers over a creeping mass of delicate green leaves and then has vanished back into the ground completely by the end of April for another year .
When you come across a clump of the American skunk cabbage, lysichiton americanus , in bloom in March it knocks you back such is the impact of it’s big yellow flowers … it is highly invasive in it’s native habitat among the rivers and swamps of the East Coast of America but here it rarely throws off self seedings which is a pity as the lovely flowers are followed by dramatic big paddle like leaves and I grow it for the leaves as the flowers are short lived lasting ten days at most but then the leaves kick in for a few months … a fabulous perennial .
Beautiful as the flowers on the american skunk cabbage are I grow it for it’s dramatic foliage .
Colour in the Garden in March
Time for reflection !
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