From January through June, Matt Collins, writer and Head Gardener at the Garden Museum, will document the subtle and often overlooked scenes of a changing garden. Join us throughout the season as he reflects on the ever-changing landscape of his Hampshire plot. Read part one, part two and part three here.
7th March 2025
A week of sudden and prolonged warmth has got things moving: rose buds inch upwards along the wires, their leaves tightly feathered like Grecian stonework; the sage is greening, as are the honeysuckle and clematis; the window box is blue with muscari and throughout the sunny border formerly submerged perennials are making their whereabouts known. Bumblebees bounce between pulmonaria petals and the first butterflies — the acid-yellow brimstones — flit vertically over the fence; I can’t recall seeing them in such numbers before. There is a perceptible shift in the bird song, too — the beginning of a new movement in the four-season symphony: the robin’s convivial chatter has lost its winter echo; doves murmur in the neighbour’s vast apple tree; the cries of geese passing overhead relay a certain agitation, as does the wren’s territorial staccato raining down from the shed. In the mornings, now, the denser air buoys the repetitive cooing of wood pigeons: going up to wake our five year old this week I found him listening intently to their calls. ‘That’s a whistle-head’, he informs me, still listening. The fact he has named a faceless bird, by its recurrent morning calls alone, I find beyond adorable. What disappointment when he meets the whistle-head in person…
11th March 2025
The cold nights have returned, but walking down the hill from the station late this evening, the palpable chill felt somehow stifled, repressed by the spring warmth that has already stirred — in the ground and in the trees — and now cannot be reversed; the cold missing its bite.
12th March 2025
Arrived in the post, two 9cm pots of pink muhly grass, Muhlenbergia capillaris. Each is a tight little clump of soft wispy stems around 40cm high. Freed from their cardboard packaging, I took them straight out to the back of the garden for planting. For years I’ve wanted to try out this curious North American sedge, never before having possessed quite the right conditions to accommodate it, namely full sunshine and light, freely draining soil. But having cleared the raised area beside the shed recently — our scrappy sun trap — I’m hoping they’ll have a suitable home. Images on the internet no doubt exaggerate the muhly’s pink with boosted saturation, but I’m dying to see the effect for real; a shift in late summer that candy-flosses the straw stems, a pinkness like heatstroke.
14th March 2025
Eagerly potting up lilies and dahlias today, sourced from Riverside Bulbs in Suffolk, a favourite supplier of species bulbs. I skipped dahlias last year and hugely regretted it, the sunny border feeling far emptier in late summer than the previous year — and I always forget how long late summer goes on for, unlike the heartbeat of spring and early summer. Just two varieties: an apricot pompon (‘Beatrice’) and a Bishop (the blood orange ‘Oxford’), the former offering height and the latter, bulk. The lilies are a first for this garden, however; just three bulbs of ‘Lady Alice’. I have quietly decided that this will be the year I push for outright floral abundance; an ‘on year’ to follow 2024’s fallow. I want fillers, spillers, climbers and creepers, and flowers to fill the house.
19th March 2025
From the back of the garden I am watching a solitary blue tit work its way along each tethered stem of the climbing 'Claire Austin' rose, pecking at the leaf recesses with sudden jerks of the head and body. Are they aphids, it’s finding? Or early ladybirds? Directly below, a blackbird is tossing and strewing the mulch, seeking out its own forage. After days without rain the topsoil is already loose and dry. Faith in a deeper dampness is keeping me from uncoiling the hose.
20th March 2025
An unsettled mood this morning, so rather than rush to the laptop I went into the garden to sow seeds: calendula, cosmos, Ammi visnaga and South African foxglove, which I bought on a whim (from the packet description, somewhere between a violet penstemon and a tall campanula). I now sow only into 9cm pots, foregoing seed trays and root trainers; something I picked up from deputy head gardener at Great Dixter gardens, Coralie Thomas. It’s one of the most valuable tips I’ve gained in recent years, saving time, space and frequent trips with the watering can, inducing seedlings to develop deep roots.
I did some potting on, too: hollyhocks sown last year, along with seedlings of Spanish asphodel and the curious ‘cabbage tree’, endemic to islands off the Chilean coast. Amazed to see that particular plant pull through the winter cold: props to the cold frame. It has served well so far, made from lumps of flint and brick dug up from the garden and redundant perspex once used as covid screening in an office, which I framed with wood to make the lids. It took weeks to construct, owing to the kids being so small, but having wanted a stone cold frame for so long I persevered.
The church bell had thumped ten by the time the last of the seeds were sown, and my mood had changed completely, revived by sunshine and active distraction.
21st March 2025
19 degrees at peak here today; ‘the hottest day of the year!’, the headlines proclaim, as though such a temperature arriving any sooner wouldn’t have been utterly unnerving. Sowed some runner beans with our littlest — for the flowers as much as the pods — and scattered horned poppy seed around the muhlys at the back of the garden, collected from last year's blooms.
26th March 2025
Searching back through my garden diary today, to find the names of long-sown perennials, I came to an entry from this time two years ago, written the day before a five-week family road trip around Spain and Morocco. ‘A pang of regret for the spring that will be missed’. It is true that, besides December and January, the only viable time a gardener can leave their garden is when its at its most exciting, in late March and April when everything has at last shaken off winter dormancy — when it’s all popping off at once but requires little management or maintenance. The cooler temperatures and probable showers of April put you at ease while away, even if you’re missing the vernal exhibition you spent so many months preparing. But by May there are seeds to sow, cuttings to grow; then summer staking and deadheading, and autumn mulching and seed collecting. So you get out while you can. I’m glad not to be missing the show this year, though.
Today spring is racing along the back lanes of our southern country, breaking blackthorn buds and whitening the wood anemones at their feet, sending a pulse down the hedgerows.
Matt Collins is a garden and travel writer, and head gardener at the Garden Museum in London.
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