Cherrie Notes

It was a case of rain stopped play this week, wasn’t it?

One glorious day of spring cum summer on Tuesday and it’s been downhill all the way since.

I’m trying very hard not to be a weather bore though, because everything looks so fresh and new after a shower/downpour.

The fields and hedgerows on the drive into work on Wednesday were positively pinging with green-ness or “verdure” as a Romanian friend of mine once said, remembering with a dewy eye a happy visit here. “Ah, Ireland,” he said,”you have so much verdure.”

Indeed we do... and it’s a great word which is now and forever in my mind when I look out at my rain-drenched garden.

Rain may have stopped play as far as this gardener is concerned, but the plants in the main just love it. Even before the weather took a nose dive the extra warmth in the air and in the ground worked it’s magic.

Almost before my very eyes plants are stretching,spreading and budding up.

The leaves on the Maples have unfurled and are fanning out by the second and the clumps of hardy geraniums are growing up, out and over, obscuring among other things, a lovely little newly planted heritage primrose bred by Joe Kennedy.

These subtle delicately-coloured primroses with their dark burgundy foliage with undertones of green make a more gentle impression to the garden in spring than their bolder, brighter, bedding plant cousins.

We’re hoping to call in to see Joe one of these weeks to find out more about the primrose breeding process and why he loves these dainty spring plants which were once so much a part of the wider rural landscape.

Another tiny, dainty plant which I’m a little bit in love with at the moment is an Ipheon, a delicate woodlander with pale star-shaped flowers and fine foliage and two varieties came home with me last weekend from the plant benches at Mounstewart. See them growing happily and abundantly in the Mairi garden there and you’ll be smitten, just like me.

At the best of times and in terms of scale, I have the willpower of a gnat when it comes to buying plants but at this time of year I’m a complete pushover.

So, waiting in the wings to be freed from their pots are Lavender, Rosemary, a pot of lovely creamy, greeny, pinky Tulips, Narcissus “Thalia” with it’s delicate alabaster flowers (can’t get enough!) and another even more delicate Primrose “Lady Greer” with it’s soft buttermilk-coloured flowers carried on gently elongated stems, which came from Barbara Pilcher at Lisdoonan.

It’s going to live beneath a Cornus Kousa, a pretty softly coloured Hellebore, an Azalea Lutea which is just about to burst it’s buds, a deep pink Saxifrage and a little violet Vinca which is scrambling across and tumbling down a terraced stone wall.

We’re in studio this Saturday with our phone-in for May when Barbara will be with us to dispense lots of great gardening knowledge and she’ll be joined by Averil Milligan, Head Gardener at Rowallane.

I hope you’ll be able to join us and if not, you can hear the programme repeat on Sunday just after one'o’clock, you can listen again over the next seven days via the BBC iPlayer or download Gardeners' Corner as a podcast and many thanks to those of you who do just that every week.