Still Cold.

Another grey and chilly day. A lonely blackbird was all fluffed up to try and keep warm this evening. We had some sleet in the morning but I wrapped up well and put in some time up in the scree garden. It was a bit mad but every hour spent gardening now is an hour less later, or even more when you factor in that the weeds grow and the fallen leaves break up and turn into a horrible slushy mess. The current job is working on the big stone circle which is the main design feature of the scree garden. It's about 10ft across delineated by larger rocks. Inside that is a ring of aubretia which I grew from seed, that's an achievement for me. Inside that is a ring of sedum plants, a later (Sept) flowering variety with dark red flowers, and finally a central ornamental grass to give the effect of a fountain of water splashing out. It's a good idea but if I was to do it again I'd chooses a different grass. This one has very heavy seed heads which start to sprout while they are still attached to the parent plant and flop down in a tangled mass. This summer I'll try cutting the flower spikes off as soon as they start looking messy to avoid the many sprouting plantlets which I'm now having to remove. The whole scree garden is covered with stones, (each of which I'd removed from the soil, graded and washed clean!) so weeds are not too much of a problem but the nearby mature trees drop a lot of leaves which I usually end up removing by hand. I have got a leaf blower/ sucker but it only works on dry leaves and isn't that efficient.
A nice cheery picture of the scree garden from May last year.