Garden Blog - March 24

For our Roman overlords, March was the month of Mars, god of war, when the arrival of spring meant that their armies, always itching for a bust-up somewhere or other, could get back to fighting after a winter break.

Us gardeners, it has to be said, are generally speaking a rather more peaceable bunch, and prefer to see this time of year through the eyes of famed Romantic poet of yesteryear, Percy Shelley, who wrote:- 

And Spring rode on the garden fair,
Like the spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast,
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

March is the month when Spring most definitely arrives, and a kaleidoscope of floral colour, be it courtesy of bulbs and corms such as narcissi and crocus, herbaceous perennials like primulas and hellebores, or shrubs such as Japanese quinces and daphnes burst forth with abundance.

A true showstopper at this time of year, several of which are planted beside our Parterre Path, is a shrub known to botanically minded types as Daphne odora, otherwise referred to as winter daphne. This small evergreen shrub is native to China, Korea, and Japan. The specific epithet odora means ‘fragrant’, and such is its heady potency that in Korea it’s rather poetically called chullihyang, meaning ‘thousand mile scent’, and quite rightly so. Daphne odora was first collected and introduced into cultivation by a Swedish naturalist, Carl Peter Thunberg, in the late eighteenth century. 

The plant collecting endeavours or Mr. Thunberg were very much appreciated by visitors to our Snowdrop Sundays, a great number of whom commented on its beautiful flowers and delicious scent.

Talking of snowdrops, we’re not resting on our laurels here at Deene Park, and to ensure that our display next year is even better, we are now lifting and dividing them to increase their numbers and extend their coverage. As the snowdrop flowers fade, large clumps are lifted and divided into smaller clumps of about half a dozen bulbs and replanted at the same depth over a larger area. After a few years, these clumps will have bulked up, and be ready to lift and divide again, creating an ever more impressive display. The same goes for our collection of unusual named varieties. Snowdrops enjoy a shaded spot beneath deciduous trees or shrubs, that shed their leaves over winter, but are not particularly fussy where soil is concerned, so long as it doesn’t suffer extremes of dryness or waterlogging.

Finally, in recent stormy weather, we had a mature incense cedar in our Pleasure Grounds felled by the wind. Although an undoubtedly sad loss, the cycle of life carries on regardless, and the large gap left behind has been filled with a new specimen tree. Tree planting is a task best carried out just now, and we have planted a number of new and interesting additions to our Pleasure Grounds. These include Liquidambar styraciflua ‘Worplesden’ a sweetgum with particularly good autumn colour, and a white flowered Japanese apricot named Prunus mume ‘Omoi-no-mama’ which rather charmingly translates into English as ‘Memories of Mother.
As spring is the perfect time for so much new planting, it’s easy to forget that our gardens are to be admired, but we must take that time out, as before we know it the season is lost.

Until next month, happy gardening.

Daphne Odorata	Snowdrops	Liquidambar Styraciflua Worpleson	Felled Calocedrus decurrens