To every thing there is a season

“To every thing there is a season” says the Bible.  “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”  Wise words, but it has to be said that late April is not the time to pluck up camassias and re-plant them elsewhere.  But sometimes needs must.

A load of camassias

I planted both white and blue camassias long years ago, but the blue ones – admittedly in a less favourable location than the white ones – faded away some time back.  There are still some white ones flowering every spring, rather later than the blue ones did (different subspecies perhaps?).  The soil round here is drier than they like, which might be part of the problem.  I have occasionally considered buying some more blue ones - they're lovely flowers and good for cutting - but didn’t really have a good position available to put them in.  But when a neighbour was offering blue camassias that he was throwing out in order to redesign his garden, I readily accepted.  What I didn’t expect was a whole wheelbarrow-full of them.

New quarters

The plants were rather wilted, dug up a few days earlier I think; the weather has been warm and dry the past few days (now back to dull and with a chilly wind again).  They had already been in flower, and the flower-heads had to go to allow the bulbs to grow on; I also cut off the leaf-tops which were going to flop all over the place and get in the way.  I found room for some of the bulbs in the old herb patch, where they can fight it out with the symphyandra, and put a few more in a pot of old compost in case I find a place for them elsewhere.  I expect it will take a couple of years for the bulbs to recover from the shock, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.  The remainder of the plants went to the compost heap.

It is still the season for dandelions; I found a couple hiding among the cowslips in the lawn and dug them out.

Hiding among the cowslips

Observing garden wildlife is a never-ending lesson.  I’ve long been aware that there are seasons for certain butterflies; a few species overwinter here as adults and occasionally over winter a red admiral or small tortoiseshell turns up in the garage or even indoors, while others hatch out from their larval state in spring or in waves later on.  A few, such as painted ladies, are true migrants.  The earliest butterflies in these parts are always the brimstones, which have been on the wing since late March this year, and I had to rescue a comma from being trapped in the greenhouse earlier this month; we’re now in the season for orange-tips.  There has also been a good number of little blue butterflies fluttering around the garden; they rarely land anywhere for long and I’ve had difficulty getting a good look at them, though I’ve suspected that they are holly blues.  The other day I managed to take a photo of one resting on the red camellia, and it is indeed a holly blue; later in the year the common blues seem to be … well, more common – though again it can be hard to get a good view of them!

Holly blue

One thing that never seems to be out of season is the slug and snail population.  I took some sunflower seedlings out of the shelter of the propagator once they had germinated, and left them in the greenhouse to recover before I put them out in the cold frame, only to find the next day that the tips had been munched off.  Fortunately I have more sunflower seeds (and cosmos, which had suffered the same fate) and re-sowed; a lesson learnt!

Need to start again ....