I was chatting to someone about pansies, and I thought, you know, I could grow pansies. Pansies are simple and forgiving plants. So I bought a box and they are doing pretty well in several baskets and pots now.
Spurred by this success and the cheerful encouraging faces of the pansies, I mowed at least some of the grass, cleared out some old overgrown pots, and planted some new passionflowers, some strange stripy petunias, and an ivy-leaved geranium. Here's the petunia. I like that it looks like it has separate petals until you look more closely.
This Centaurea montana, or perennial cornflower is not new, but it's one of my very favorite plants, and fortunately it does pretty well despite neglect. It usually has bees bumbling around it too, and the flowering season is long. I don't know why it's not more popular, I seem to remember having some difficulty getting hold of it when I planted this. Maybe I'll plant some more of them, there seem to be online suppliers now.
I wrestled with the grape vine, trimmed the fig, and attacked the (far too large, annoyingly male) Actinidia arguta with passion and secateurs. The fig already has a bunch of green figs on it, and I have a feeling they have been on there since last year, but they look all right: not yellow or wizened. It was mostly a fairly mild winter this year, I wonder if it will manage to ripen last year's fruit, as they are supposed to do. It's never managed that before.
