All these photos were taken in a thirty minute spell on a sunny day in mid January and my purpose was to highlight winter colour at a time of year when the sun is low in the sky but with the right light and particularly if water is included in the composition you can forget the biting wind and the freezing temperature !!                                                  

I bought some nice primroses in the January sale at Johnstown Nursery this week , the new irish bred chocolate  green type as distinct from the common olive green leaved native to Ireland and the UK . This new variety has been on the market for the past three years and has been a marketing sensation, the variety has been patented so the plant can only be produced commercially under licence which has made the individual plant expensive at seven euros each ….. seven euros for a primrose or cow slip as they are known locally and which grow wild along ditches and hedgerows  ?  Which is why I resisted […]

As this is the last day of 2013 I have already moved on and am looking forward to a New Year in the Garden ! I always regard January as a time to walk around the garden taking in ideas as to what needs to be done before the growth begins again in earnest in March . Everything is dormant with all planting reduced to a skeleton outline which I find very beautiful particularly in hard frosty weather . Of course as gardeners we are always watching the weather , too frosty and we worry about another big freeze like the winters of 2009 and 2010 when plants were frozen solid […]

This week Santa sent me a helper all the way from EULEX in Kosovo and it was a case of have a Happy Pruning Christmas ! Snezana as I have said previously has a deep aversion for learning the latin names of plants but is a demon for hard work , so give her a pruning shears and a slash hook and point her in the direction of overgrown brambles , trees in need of cutting back etc. and afterwards it is like the avenging Passover Angel  has walked through the garden ! This week I targeted an area that had got out of control over the past few years […]

The unusual spell of dry weather these past four weeks has meant that I have been able to spend a lot more time in the garden and as a result am way ahead of my normal schedule but the combination of the dry summer coupled with this mild autumn has meant the leaves have stayed longer on the trees but when they started to come down …. they came down with a vengeance ! Normally I am not phased out by fallen leaves and have had no problem leaving them pile up and have accepted it as natural and always wondered at the fixation other gardeners had about clearing and […]

There is still some nice colour in the garden and only two weeks to Christmas .     This week I finished tidying up the gunnera by folding the blackened  giant leaves back across the crown of each clump which will protect from the worst of the frost of January and February and I like to think these piles of folded giants will provide a warm snug shelter for any passing  hedgehogs for the next few months .  For the past three weeks I have mislaid my secateurs somewhere in the garden , my familiar red handled Felco one which I have had for the past ten years and no doubt […]

This my current I Pod country music Garden  Play List  together with  personal notes on the songs as to why they feature  . I have borrowed the title from Lynn Anderson’s 1970’s hit as it gives the right gardening vibe but have not included the twee song itself  as that would be a vibe too many !   Don Gibson – Oh Lonesome me  …. always a favourite of mine recorded in the 1950’s , written by Gibson , a two hit wonder as he also wrote and recorded Sea of Heartbreak and with those two legendary songs to his credit why bother anymore ! Alabama – Speed of the sound of […]

Frost has arrived but these alpine plants in a container in the front garden  don’t mind ! Sempervivums and sedums  I am currently planting a new mixed border bed which I opened up in September opposite the other new bed , the pampas/ miscanthus area and running almost the same length about four metres away and the reason being that it creates a grassy avenue of a walk between the two new beds and immediately adds interest to what previously was the top end of the field so now when you come around the corner you see the gravel path to your left , beside it the new miscanthus bed […]

The first hard frosts of the winter hit this week and while the autumn colours of the trees are still magnificent there is that drab damp feeling beginning to envelope the garden which is why I find the more primary colour you can inject into the garden through garden furniture etc. helps lift those gloomy days  . I can’t claim credit for the yellows and blues that our wooden garden furniture now sports as I was force fed into those by Sanna . This injection of colour had started innocuously enough a few years ago with the purchase of the  odd red and black ceramic pot in the garden centres […]

You don’t need to be a photographer to be a good gardener in fact you don’t need to even have a camera but it helps enormously to display your garden at its best moments throughout the seasons if you can take some nice photos and for me gardening and photography go hand in hand  . My second hobby after gardening has been photography and I quickly progressed from my first instamatic kodak camera to a compact canon back in the late 1960’s until I made the step up to 35 mm with my first SLR which was a Pentax . Back then there were five major camera systems, Canon, Minolta , […]