Spring!

It seems like it is Spring again in the Netherlands. On Easter and during many days after, we had weather like this
with lots of hail, sleet, snow and frost but yesterday it was suddenly Spring again with temperatures around 14 C. In my conservatory it became quite warm, 30 C, and most of the Bliss team was there, soaking up their portion of sunshine and warmth. It was nice and sunny yesterday so I decided to work in the garden and leave all the writing and other work for later, when it wasn't so lovely outside.
My Amelanchier, behind the Victorian greenhouse, is starting to flower. Can't wait for it to be in full bloom!
All that bad weather did some damage in my garden; these poor daffodils haven't recovered and neither have the blooms on my very early flowering Bergenia. The other Bergenias are fine as their flowers were still in bud when the bad weather struck.

The mini daffs are fine though
and so are the Thalia daffodils that grow in a pot in the potager.
I love Thalia daffodils as they are very elegant, wonderfully scented and Thalia usually has more than one flower per stem, a big bonus.
It was great to be out and about in the garden again, soaking up some much needed sunshine and breathing in the fresh Spring air. And I was not the only one enjoying the lovely weather
this little bee (I think it is a bee of some sort) was busy buzzing away, jumping from flower to flower.
And then there was Dolly Daisy, she was out and about in the garden too. Dolly is great to have around and she listens very well to me and doesn't stray far from my side when I'm working in the garden.
Here we both were admiring the birdbath bed, and when I went into my kitchen garden to see how my new cold frame was holding up, Dolly was there too. This new cold frame I've put over my garlic cloves that the birds kept pulling out. It works a treat and saves me a lot of work, having to stick all those cloves back into the soil on a daily basis.
Dolly Daisy is everywhere, which can be a bit of a bother if you want to take a pic of your Anemones blanda.
Here they are minus Dolly's fluffy tail.
In the kitchen garden not everything is going to plan. No matter how many sticks I stick in and around this freshly sown bed, the neighbourhood gangsta's aka kittycats, still manage to get in and use it as a toilet. And they pull out my lovely forget-me-nots too. Grrrrrrrr! Now I have to sow my purple broccoli all over again.
The grape hyacinths are flowering merrily away in the bed underneath the standard gooseberry, which is in flower too. Hopefully we'll be getting loads of gooseberries this year.
I've bought 2 blueberries bushes last Saturday and hope to harvest some of those too later this year. They are one of my favourite fruits so I'm really looking forward to picking the first of my blueberries.

Spring has arrived in my front garden too. Here are some impressions of how it looks now.
The forget-me-nots have self seeded all over the front garden which it fine with me. It is a formal garden but I like my flowers to pop up everywhere with gay abandon.
copyright 2008 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
Thomas Nashe

On a very different note; my mother had a heart attack last Saturday and is in hospital at the moment, in ICU. Later today she will have a triple bypass operation. I hope everything goes well.