What first struck me about Anette’s post is how surprisingly similar to mine where her garden is in the march into spring.  The small skinny trough at the foot of the stairs to the cottage front door, which I recently posted a photo of full of crocuses, is now blindingly yellow with eager, enthusiastic little Tete a tete daffs.*  I have primroses everywhere.**  I have all those Little Blue Things I can’t keep straight.  I have several varieties of lungwort, the pink, the blue, the pink and blue, and the white, with variously interestingly spotted and mottled leaves.  My crocuses and snowdrops are mostly going over and my early iris aren’t out yet at the cottage although they are at Third House.  And I certainly have the little wild violets which while I don’t want to be without them ARE A TOTAL THUG and I get a little hysterical when I find them colonising another of my pots where if radical action is not taken immediately they’ll have crushed whatever I planted in that pot into a victimised corner with its hands over its face crying for mercy.

Spring.  Yes.  Spring.

And then last night we had what Nadia’s mum today told me jovially was the coldest night this winter—except that it’s supposed to be spring—and while yes, this is the south of England, and we’re only talking a few degrees of frost, we’re talking a few degrees of frost when everything has been rioting out in relatively warm sunshine for the last fortnight or so ARRRRRRGH.  And I have a Winter Table full of potted up dahlias and begonia tubers.  ARRRRRRRRGH.

* * *

* They smell good too, although there are other daffs with more scent:  Cheerfulness, for example, or Erlicheer, which are probably my two favourites for fragrance, but they don’t keep on and on the way that trough of Tete a tete does.  Maybe the cursed mice are getting them.  I can’t keep bulbs going at all in the back garden because of the sodblasted mice:  I net a few pots every year and am getting better about remembering to take the gorblimey netting off before it strangles the bulbs trying to come up through it^ and that’s nearly it for spring bulbs.  The local field mice, frustrated of their once rich banquets of tulips, may be indulging their grievance by eating daffs instead, although they’re not supposed to—daffs are one of the bulbs you’re supposed to plant if you have a mouse problem.  Ha ha.  But my garden ought to be jammed full of daffs and it’s not.  The one bulb the local vermin seem pretty reliably not to like is hyacinths and I do keep a few pots of crocuses going by storing the pots in relatively inaccessible areas the mice can’t be bothered to hire a helicopter and a rope ladder to attack.  Mostly I resign myself to replanting crocuses.  Or netting them.  They’re tiny enough they can usually scramble through the netting even if I forget to take it off.  Ahem.

I keep the plastic half barrel by the kitchen door that I use as a waterbutt covered so nothing is tempted to drown itself.  But the pink bucket also by the kitchen door which is my kitchen-waste compost bucket, in the weather we’ve had this winter fills up with rain because since it’s been always raining I haven’t often felt like going outside to empty it into the compost bag that the city council carts away every fortnight and turns into, you know, compost.^^   As a result I have twice found a drowned mouse floating among the apple cores.  I do not mourn—if they stay out of the house I’m grudgingly more or less willing to take a ‘it’s their planet too’ attitude, but they’re still evil bulb-eating marauders—but, yo, dufflebrain, why?  You’ve got an entire garden full of fresh tasty plant life and you’re diving for apple cores and slimy vegetable peelings?  Unfortunately the hellterror discovered the second cadaver at the same moment I did NOOOOOOOOOO —providentially I nailed her before anything irretrievable happened but she now carefully examines that frelling bucket every time she goes into the back garden.

^ It can take hours to cut a lot of half-grown shoots out of heavy plastic small-gauge mouse-proof netting.  You don’t have to ask me how I know this, do you?

^^ I’m more than happy to buy it back as realio-trulio plant-stuff-in-it compost for the privilege of not having to take up the space in my handkerchief-garden for my own compost heap or heaps,+ since to do it right you have to have more than one.  But I do get broody about a wormery occasionally.  You can get quite little ones and, you know, it’s critters.

+ I have THREE compost heaps at Third House.  Which must be appropriate.

** With reference to a conversation about nomenclature on the forum I haven’t a clue about what’s correct.  I think of what I grow as primroses—both the double ones I think I’ve posted photos of^ and the little wild-type ones like in Anette’s photos which also lurk in corners of my garden.^^  The fancy ‘laced’ and all the other exotic-looking ones are, to me, primulas.

Cowslips come out a little later—I have a fabulous rust-red one just beginning to unfurl now. I have no idea where it came from, and I don’t think I knew they existed in any colour but the basic species yellow.  It’s in a pot which I clearly planted, so I must have rescued it from somewhere, recognising the leaves as primrose/cowslip and therefore worthy of rescue—is it a volunteer?  I don’t know.  Gibble.  But when I said that cowslips, theoretically endangered in the wild, are weeds in my garden, and someone told me loftily that weeds are only plants in the wrong place—yes, I know that one, thanks—I was referring to the way they grew, not that I didn’t like them.  I think they’re darling.  I’ve been known to hoick out a few of my surplus, put them and a trowel in a plastic bag, and take some hellcritters for a stroll over suitable countryside and whack them in in a bank somewhere—since they’re endangered in the wild.  This is probably illegal or something and since I know it’s desperately illegal to pluck wildflowers or to dig them up I live in fear of someone catching me at my guerrilla gardening and jumping to the wrong conclusion.  But if I didn’t, um, weed them, I’d have a garden with nothing but cowslips in it.

^ If not I will.