Eleven lavenders

artur green lizardIt’s the curse of the green lizard season again.   You can’t stop a cat from being a hunter; but I do wish he wouldn’t go for the slow moving cold blooded varieties of green lizard. They exude a poison which makes this elderly cat rather sick indeed.

He spent the day yowling and crying and feeling floppy and following me about. It’s all a bit heart breaking, but we just have to wait and see what effect the poison will have. It will be the end of him eventually, but for now I’m rather hoping I see him bright and chirpy tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I did manage to plant a few trees.   I had two lovely cornus kousa var. chinensis trees to get in the ground. cornus kousa planted

One went into the very end of the wildflower garden; it will be a bit shaded by the elderflower tree on the terrace above it, but I believe it will take a bit of cool.   And the other went next to the apple tree at the end of the calabert garden.

They are delightful little trees and I’ve been yearning to buy them for ages. And it was only because I was cruising the rows at the plant nursery that I spied them. If they weren’t labelled, I wouldn’t have spotted the spindly sticks as tremendous trees.

cotinus plantedI also planted a cotinus coggygria Royal Purple (smoke bush) up in the hedge above the potting shed. I had one gap from a rose rugosa that didn’t survive the winter. So in it went.

And that felt like the sum total of my day. I did collect lots of flowers for vases for our house and the Balayns. Tulips and cherry blossom and euphorbias. euphorbia in vases

Actually the euphorbias were just prunings. I had to cut back the plants that have invaded the strawberry bed.   So I decided that they could go in a vase for a few days before heading to the compost heap.

I managed to sow more seeds and pot on yet more salad plants.   But then I headed out to try and make a start on the lavenders.

11 lavendersI need to make sure each plant in the bank can have its own little bowl of soil so that I can pour in a bucket of water every two weeks and not have all the water run off.   So that meant moulding each little plant with more soil that I had left over from the planting of the perovskia and rosemary. lavenders overhead

Naturally I chose the eleven easiest lavenders to work on.   And once they were done, I sifted some good mulch into each bowl to make sure I would remember which were done and which needed to be worked on.   Next week I will attack the rest.