Through the Garden Gate December 2023

What a stormy month December has been! The garden is looking very battered by all the wind and rain with debris scattered about all over the place. It needs a good tidy up but I can't see that happening for a while yet.  

Not much gardening gets done in December, I do like to see this time of year as a time of rest from the garden. It's such a busy time getting ready for Christmas. At the beginning of December our church put on a Christmas tree display, with the different groups within the church decorating a tree to show the work they do. Our church isn't very big but we managed to fit eight trees around the building. Here are a couple of them.

The following weekend we went to visit our daughter Sarah in Bedfordshire and her church also had a Christmas tree festival. This church was bigger than ours and there was plenty to look at. 

Most of my December garden work has been foraging for evergreen foliage and making up Christmas wreaths for the front and side doors to the house as well as arrangements for indoors.

 I potted up the three white hellebores which I bought from RHS  Harlow Carr last month and put one on the garden patio table, one at the side door and the other at the front door.  These will keep going for quite a while through the winter.

Now as we move into the new year I'm starting to think about what changes I might make to the garden. There are some plants which have taken over and  need moving to make more space. There's always something new you can do in the garden. 

Looking round the garden this week I have noticed snowdrops coming through and cyclamen are already flowering in the woodland beds. There is a lot to look forward to. 

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and I wish you much good health and happiness in 2024.

I am linking this blog post to Sarah's blog at 'Down by the Sea ' for her monthly 'Through the Garden Gate ' post.

Through the Garden Gate--November 2023

November seems to have flown by so much that I nearly forgot about my end of month blog. We've had a lot of rain and not many good days to get out and do any gardening. As it was so wet and I couldn't get out I took a photo of the garden viewed from the house. It is still colourful so I haven't done any cutting back, even the seed heads look good. 

Early in the month I managed to get some tidying done, paths swept and cleared of moss and weeds. I bought tulip bulbs and planted them in pots. I went for orange and purple colours this time, I'm hoping they go well together. This week I started cutting foliage in preparation for making Christmas wreaths. I'll be making two, one for the front of the house and the other for the side door, any foliage left will be used in the house in vases. 

This week we visited RHS Harlow Carr. It was a beautiful day but very cold. It takes us just over an hour to get there and because of the shorter days now we didn't have a lot of time to walk around and fit lunch in as well. But it was still a lovely change to get out in the sunshine. The colours are still good especially the stems of the dogwoods which look great next to the white bark of the birch trees. 

They were getting the garden ready for Christmas, can you see the big baubles in the tree below?

We like to walk along the streamside, there is a lot of  improvement work being done which we hope will be finished next time we go.

I liked the pink seed heads on these grasses.

I managed to spend some of my birthday gardening vouchers in the shop before we left. I bought three white hellebores which are flowering now and I will plant them in pots for Christmas displays. 

I am linking this blog post to Sarah's blog at 'Down By the Sea' for her monthly 'Through the Garden Gate' post