New year, new discoveries

After an ideal amount of rest and socialising, I picked up my gardening trowel again today and headed out in the woodland for some excavating.

We have heard from several local people that there is generally a gorgeous display of snowdrops in the woodland around this time of year. We’ve seen snowdrop-like leaves emerging from the tops of the walls in the walled garden, but nothing in the woodland. I had a suspicion that the ivy might be smothering them, so I asked Kay, my gardening mentor for advice yesterday and she told me to just pull the ivy back and see what was there…

After an hour or two of cleaning tools and sharpening my pruning shears, I headed out into surprisingly glorious sunshine and started doing some experimental peeling back of the ivy near the top of the path into the woods.

At first I wasn’t finding very much – the odd bulb or two – definitely not snowdrops. But as I excavated closer and closer to the stream, I started to find hundreds of small bulbs in clumps – with fresh green leaves poking up through the earth. They had been entirely concealed by the ivy. The more ivy I pulled back, the more I discovered. It was like finding buried treasure and I got a bit carried away. The earth is so soft down there that I could peel back the ivy like a roll of carpet!

Unfortunately, I’m fairly sure none of these plants are snowdrops. My plant finder app isn’t too helpful without developed leaves or flowers to go on – but some of them look like them may be arum maculatum, AKA lords and ladies, which have lovely pale lily flowers in spring and intense clusters of very red berries in autumn. I shall keep an eye on the exposed areas over the next few weeks to see what emerges, and also to see whether the clumps which are still buried under ivy are able to emerge without any additional help from me.