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.
2 replies on “Cottage Garden Project Update: January 2016”
I look forward to seeing how things develop
Thanks Sue, it’ll probably take a few years to get it to where we want it to be, but we’ll enjoy the work along the way.