A Sunday at home...

After spending such a long time out birding on Saturday I decided to take a break on Sunday and to stay at home. The weather forecast - heavy rain/thunderstorms - had nothing to do with my decision, well not much! As it turned out I could have easily enjoyed a morning’s birding as the day dawned dry, bright and sunny.

By mid-morning Lynda had succeeded in talking me into making a trip to the local garden centre; it’s time to start thinking about summer bedding plants again, apparently! We picked up six trays of African Marigolds and eight Begonias to go with the Geraniums that Lynda had bought at the local market on Saturday. We’ll be making more trips to the garden centre over the next few weeks as the choice of plants gets better.

African Marigolds.

Begonias.

Once back home I started to look for jobs to do around the garden. A rather large Californian Lilac caught my eye! The “Blue Bush”, as we have nicknamed the plant over the years, has been earmarked for removal for sometime now and on Sunday the day of reckoning finally arrived. A couple of hours later and it was all over, the lilac was gone, the recycling bin was full and we had suddenly regained a large area of garden.

Before the saw came out...

During the clearance...

All cleared away.

The only downside to the “clearance work” is that the House Sparrows have now lost one of their meeting places - they used to drop onto the lilac before flying onto the feeding station. We’ll be planting the sparrows a new tree in the near future but it will be further into the corner of the garden so that it doesn’t dominate the border quite so much!

In other parts of the garden, the Alliums are doing well with flower stems popping up all over the place and the Bleeding Heart is now in full flower. Summer is slowly, but surely, creeping up on us. This coming weekend is the first of the May Bank Holiday Weekends so no doubt the weather will take a turn for the worse and we’ll get snow or something equally un-seasonal!

Bleeding Heart.