Ushering in Spring

What I wanted to do this week was bow out and let a poet supply the words. But I cannot find the poem I want (I've just spent more than half-an-hour looking for it on my own PC and online): I read it years ago and it comes into my mind at this time every year ... I shall search for it again and perhaps I'll manage to put it here next week.

What brought the poem home to me once again was spending an afternoon in Mount Usher Gardens with a friend, celebrating her birthday, enjoying the cool sunshine, wandering through the garden, from time to time stopping to look, sometimes to sketch, or just to chat ... (Thanks for a lovely day LB!)

I think the best sight for me was a huge Magnolia tree, its bright white, but pink-tinged, goblets glowing against a blue sky. We don't get to see magnolias of that size too often in Ireland and to see one with a deep blue sky behind was a blessing. I remarked to some other (French I think) visitors how beautiful it was and one of them agreed but said that he was rather disappointed with the messy planting underneath ... (a mass of wild garlic and scillas). What I didn't say out loud was "It's a Robinsonian garden for heaven's sake! It's supposed to look slightly wild!" At last I'm learning the difference (well, sometimes) between inner voice and outer voice.  I know I find many of the very formal gardens in France and Italy to be much too controlled for my taste, but perhaps if that's what someone has grown up with, the informality of somewhere like Mount Usher might well be a bit of a surprise. It's gorgeous though. As well as the magnolias, there are deep red rhododendrons, camellias and white cherries in flower at the moment; there are exotic looking trilliums coming into their own, and there are squills, ramsons and wild garlic smothering  the woodland floor, punctuated here and there with fritillaries. And as well as all that - a river runs through it.

Magnolia in Mount Usher Gardens

Camellia

Trillium sp.

Trillium sp.

The River Vartry runs through Mount Usher Gardens

While I was out looking at someone else's garden, the resident photographer was finding treasures on our own little patch:

Muscari macro shot by catchlight.ie (http://www.facebook.com/Catchlight.Ireland)

And today, in the same patch, I spent some time re-potting in the greenhouse (alpines mostly, though also some hostas, some cuttings from a friend's garden and my puny tomato and cucumber seedlings) and just marvelling in the rest of the garden as the late spring started to show off a bit: racing spikenard, impossibly beautiful unfurling ferns and the expectant curves of comfrey florets (I have Symphytum 'Moulin Rouge' which is a lovely variety).   But I'm mourning the loss of water from our garden pool: it was the perfect storm of a loose flagstone, a ball in the water, a loud splash, one surprised schnauzer and a sudden gap in the edging of the pool. A few hours later the water had started go down and it's clear that somewhere there's a tear in the butyl liner. We'll have to put some thought and effort into fixing all that, but it might be a chance to change the level of water in the pool - something I'd wanted to do for a while.

To end this week, here's a cone I picked up in our local park from underneath one of the Giant Sequoias:

Old cone of Sequoiadendron

 Have a good week all.