Cheering up a winter garden

February is an impatient month. Plants don’t visibly grow from day to day. The roses and the fuchsia are looking sorry for themselves and the pelargoniums are indoors. Bulbs that I planted last autumn are just starting to emerge tantalisingly from the soil. Every morning I rush out and see what has changed from the day before and the answer is ‘not much’.

Our garden has beautiful mature trees, but there was not much else there when we moved in a year and a half ago. What’s more the trees are mostly fruit trees, which is wonderful in spring and summer, but currently they have no leaves. The garden would look very stark at the moment if it wasn’t for the gorgeous fatsia in the bottom corner, a bushy cistus in a large pot, a lovely subtle pink hellebore, and my faithful hebes dotted around here and there.

So how to cheer up a February garden? The other day I was inspired by something that Alan Titchmarsh said on Classic FM. If you buy one flowering plant every month, you will be sure to always have something in bloom. What a lovely idea …

We already had one or two primroses in the garden and they appeared to be doing well in our soil and climate, though the pigeons often enjoy a good peck. Judging that these would probably be a safe bet I went along to our local Homebase five minutes’ walk away, and picked up some lovely blue and dark pink primroses for the bottom of the garden. So far so good. The blue ones are an extraordinary colour.

But I’m afraid I discovered that – like some people with the biscuit tin – buying just one set of primroses wasn’t going to be enough …

I decided it would be nice to get a few more bulbs, as Homebase had several that were already flowering and the ones in our garden were clearly going to take their time. So I bought some adorable little snowdrops, irises and crocuses. I planted some of the crocuses in the lawn, inspired by the carpets of crocuses I had seen when walking in St James’ Park the previous week.

The next day there was carnage. Squirrels always like a good scrabble around when I’ve planted something, but this was another level entirely. They had left the snowdrops and irises, but the crocuses were scattered to the four winds and the bulbs nowhere to be seen.

I quickly turned to google to find out more about squirrels and bulbs. There’s plenty of advice out there involving wire mesh and so on. But the best advice for me was to avoid the bulbs that squirrels particularly like and focus on the ones they don’t. Apparently they don’t like daffodils which taste bad as they have a toxin that would kill any squirrel stupid enough to carry on eating them. And apparently squirrels also turn up their noses at snowdrops.

So now I have a few snowdrops in the lawn and around the garden, and some dwarf narcissus under the trees. Gorgeous.

Except that yesterday some really foolhardy squirrel dug up a cluster of the dwarf narcissus ... I’m much more worried about the squirrel than the flowers, and hoping that he just spent a sleepless night with a stomach ache rather than anything worse.

Finally, I couldn’t help myself and decided to fill up some pots with spring flowers outside the double glass doors that look out on the garden from the kitchen. I bought some pink and yellow primroses, some extraordinary orange and yellow primulets with their subtle scent, and some highly scented pink and white hyacinths. Now we can look out onto a riot of colour that lifts the spirits first thing in the morning.

I feel like a bit of a cheat, buying ready made flowers rather than waiting for my bulbs, but I think these ones will last. And now I’m officially not going to buy any more flowers … for the rest of February at least.