Gosh what a dreich few months we have had.  Lots of cold, rainy days with grey skies.   Just in the last day or two however we have had a few glimpses of sunshine and warmth (although it is said to get colder again soon!)  There are signs of new shoots everywhere in the garden and there is lots of colour in places against the greys and browns of earth and trees.  In next door’s garden there is a tree that has some lovely blossom on it but I don’t know exactly what it is.  In summer it is a large blob of deep purple foliage, but just now there are plenty of pretty flowers on bare branches.  It might be a bird-cherry or maybe a cherry-plum, not sure.  It does create a lot of shade when in full leaf over our side of the garden at the bottom left corner so I wish they would cut it back a bit.  In the stumpery there are  white erythronium  flowers out but the yellow ones, which are much larger, follow on later.  The snowdrops and the crocuses are over, some of the narcissi are in bloom like the tete-a-tete, and the pulmonaria, primrose, perrywinkle and hellebores are in flower.  The shrub sarcococca has some lovely sweet scented white flowers on it next to the winter honeysuckle.  In the opposite corner the pieris flowers are looking good as are  the bright orange berberis flowers,  and the rhododendron has lots of buds fattening up.  They have all loved this wet weather.

What I call the middle bed hasn’t liked the wet so much.  The snow-in-summer looks very bedraggled just now but it should hopefully get going soon.  The border by the side of the ramp never looks great at this time of year as it has mainly persicaria in it which takes a while to start growing in this quite shady bit of the garden.  The garage creates a lot of shade, the walls of which are looking very grubby.

I took a couple of snaps through the window of the front garden in the rain and you can see the daffodils bent over.   A day or two later with a bit of sunshine they perked up again.  The bumble bees have certainly loved them and the flowers on the mahonia and the sulphur yellow epimedium.

I did get round to tidying the conservatory meanwhile and the cyclamen are still hanging on to some of their flowers.  There are a few flowers on the streptocarpus and a couple of tulips are about to open (they were tiny baby bulbs so the plants are quite small and I didn’t even think they would flower this year) and I have a couple of trays of cuttings ready for the Duddingston Kirk Garden Club plants sale in May.  The downside to the mild wet winter is that the bugs were not killed off and I found greenfly all over the coriander.

The pond is still looking rather bare but we have seen a few frogs about.  As yet there is still no sign of any frog-spawn though.  So far this year I haven’t spotted any heron in the garden, and come to think of it, I also haven’t seen any pheasants or foxes either so I guess they have had an easy winter.  Hopefully, after this cold weekend coming up, things will start warming up proper.

Edited 20/3/24

The frogs were out and about last night and we now have lots of frog-spawn!!  I counted at least 9 blobs so there may be 9 females this year.  There could be more as it is hard to see the individual blobs.  The frogs were on the pond surface but they heard me coming and submerged under the surface so I tried to photograph them.  It isn’t a great photo but I am just so happy to see them.