Cottage Garden Project Update: January 2016

Well, I say “update”, but there’s really not much activity to report. Earlier in the month our back yard had a light covering of snow:

…which all-but disappeared overnight. Otherwise though, it’s been as soggy as the allotment.

Floral Displays

We do have a few early flowers in the pots that we brought with us from our old house. A few very pale primroses (Primula vulgaris), some bright white cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium), a few deep red wallflowers (Erysimum sp., too many to narrow it down) that have lingered through the winter, some white hellebores (Helleborus orientalis, I think) and another hellebore species with very small, dainty green-tinged flowers (Helleborus viridis, most likely).

Just a very small pot-display at the moment, but with many more to come in due course.

Projects / Maintenance

The big news this month is that we’ve taken a major step forward on the Cottage Garden Project planning front: a consultation with local garden designer and Tatton Park RHS Gold Medal winner Joan Mulvenna of Garden Design Manchester.

Joan has a fantastic eye for making the best use of a small space like ours, and within a couple of hours she was able to give us a completely fresh perspective on how we can adapt the space to make it as attractive as possible. It was a great session, well worth Joan’s very reasonable consultation fee.

I’ll be revealing our future plans in more detail in a fresh blog post once Jo and I have had a chance to incorporate our own ideas into Joan’s outline and get them down on paper.

That’s it for January. Hopefully we’ll have a bit more to report at the end of February.