Friday 17th February 2012.
Well, hello! I thought I would create a blog to share thoughts with anyone interested. Sometimes it will be about the garden and sometimes it will be about the dog. Or life.
I reserve the right to have a moan about things that variously irritate, depress or concern me. And perhaps you will share your thoughts too.

The garden is looking a little spring-ish today; it's milder and bulbs are up and it's not all brown and miserable as it was a few weeks ago. Birds are pairing up and there are buds on some of the shrubs. The magnolia stellata has fat buds about to burst, a little starry pleasure at the side of the steps. The blasted weeds flourish whatever the weather, as far as I can see. There's bittercress everywhere and couch grass and buttercups and the malicious, sly creeping potentilla whose proper name I forget but it thrives in this garden. It reappears if you leave a tiny bit of root in the ground and sends its roots deeper and deeper to avoid my searching fork.

Tomorrow, I need to collect a couple of lengths of wood so that we can put a pergola - or maybe it's just a wide arch - in the rose hedge. The rose hedge is, as yet only about 3 feet high, and spindly, having been planted during last spring, but all the bareroot plants we put in are doing very well and one day, it's going to be a six foot wall of Rosa glauca - pinkish tinge to the leaves and single pink/white flowers.

There has been some frantic activity in the pond, so I expect there'll be frog spawn shortly. This is a good thing, not only for the continued health of the frog population that I fail to catch with the lawnmower, but also for a work colleague who wants some for her pond.

This is my first post, of very many I hope.