Today started grey and damp, but ended up quite bright and breezy, so I spent the afternoon weeding the flower bed that runs along the back of the house.

This flower bed is made up primarily of ligularias and hostas. In summer, when they’re at their peak, it is absolutely majestic, but at this time of years it’s a bit quiet, with just a few narcissus and grapehyacinth.

At one end there is our cats’ graveyard, with three little graves marked by three garden ornaments. There is Creamer’s ball (affectionately known as ‘Punchy’s Pill’), Linus’s pineapple, and Grover’s pumpkin. Planted around them are ‘Black-eyed Susan’ a lovely bright, long flowering Rudbeckia, giving a blue and yellow theme. This is continued into Spring by the grape hyacinth and narcissus, plus a regular hyacinth that I bought in a pot for Xmas a few years ago, and then planted outside. It appears without fail around this time.

This bed is a nightmare to weed. Being right next to a long, tall, hawthorn hedge it is always, and I mean always, full of twigs. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many times I pick them up, there are always more along to replace them.The air is often blue as the fierce thorns stick through mygloves into my fingers or through my shoes into my feet.

At the opposite end to the graveyard the bed deteriorates into chaos. I’ve tried to tame it, but it’s a bit of an ‘out of sight and out of mind’ area, that I’ve never quite got on top of. In early Spring it is covered in snowdrops, shortly followed by a few daffodils, but after that it rather disappears into oblivion.

A couple of years ago I sowed some foxglove seeds there, the idea being foxgloves can look after themselves and reproduce very easily if the rest of the garden is anything to go by, but for some reason it didn’t seem to work. A few plants did appear, but nothing like the block of colour and cover I was hoping for. Hey-ho.