April Heatwave

We're never satisfied really. A month ago I was moaning about how cold it had been. Although average minimum temperatures are around 6°C in March, they'd dropped to below freezing at night, and I'd had to put the fleece back on some of the tenderest plants. But then it changed and the temperature rose to more normal figures. And kept on rising.... Only a week or so ago, it rose to 32°C - unheard of in April, which usually has average temperatures of around 18°C as a daytime high. I was watering as if it was mid-August rather than spring, and these little daisies just fainted one lunchtime when I hadn't had time to water in the morning. I have to say I knew just how they felt - I was in much the same state as I wandered around town.

The daisies recovered, despite also falling prey to a nasty attack of powdery mildew. I suspect that some of the spring blooms came and went rather quicker than they might otherwise have done, though. A pity, but the heat has pushed on some of the seedlings. The aubergines are now through, and the tomatoes are begging to be transplanted.

The best show so far this month has come from the wallflowers though. I planted far too many last year, but was looking forward to seeeing them all in bloom together. I'd planted some yellow ones and some browny ones whose seeds I'd collected from last year's plants, and some red ones from a packet. I wanted them mixed in the containers so had mixed the seeds together too. How would they come out? Well, those in the first container were all yellow.

And so were those in the second container. And the second, and the third... I'll spare you the photos of all six containers. Out of about forty plants, every one that's bloomed so far has been yellow, except two which have shown a few browny streaks. Given that my sedum is also in flower, it's been a very yellow month so far....

There are some wallflower plants which haven't yet bloomed - nor even put out buds come to that. Are those the red ones and are they simply a later variety than the yellow ones, or have they just decided they can't be bothered? Time will tell...

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You know it's summer when ...

You know it's summer when ...

- the wallflowers are only still there because you want to save the seeds.

- however long you spend deadheading the surfinia, when you turn round two minutes later there are more to do.

- you spot the first flowers on your tomato plants.

- you suddenly realise you're under attack.

- plants wilt pitifully under the midday sun...

... and the hot humid afternoons are punctuated by low growls of thunder and sudden, torrential rain.

Summer has arrived. Temperatures last week were up to about 28-29°C (82-84°F) on a couple of days, and though it's now down to about 23°/24° (73-75°F - average for the time of year) it already feels as if the humidity is starting to rise - 61% this evening. Not a problem yet, but I've already warned the family that the annual "oven strike" is about to start - no more roast dinners till the autumn. It's been a shock - two weeks ago I was saying that we still had the heating on and it was teeming with rain. Well, it still is - but we've changed from constant cold, wet downpours to hot, humid storms. Early this year - they're par for the course in June and July, but less so in May. Oh well, at least no-one's going to be worying about water shortages this year ...

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Seduced

I had clear ideas for the balcony this year. It was going to be colour themed, with in-your-face containers of orange and purple muted by others of yellow and pale lilac broken up by white. Sunflowers were going to tower above calendula, zinnia and marigolds interspersed by surfinias, petunias and daisies with big, yellow centres and white petals. Black-eyed Susans were to twine their way up the canes behind. In the early part of the season, cheeky little violet pansies would poke through the foliage, to be replaced later by white and purple verbena.

And this year, I was determined. There was going to be no pink.


So where did these come from?

I was seduced. As I am every year. When I got to the supermarket and found these amazing Surfinia, Impatiens (Busy Lizzie) and New Guinea Impatiens in exactly the same amazing shade of deep pink - well, I succumbed weak-kneed.

I think I'm going to have to give up pretending I don't like pink. It's true, it's difficult to pair with other colours - but purple works fine, as these pelargoniums that I've got on the office balcony show. The purple pansies look great between the larger plants. And then, there's always white - which goes fine with everything.

And it's just as well I succumbed. because all the rest - most of which I've grown from seed - is way behind schedule. We've had the coldest, wettest May I ever remember. It started pouring down torrentially on May 3rd, and has barely stopped since. We've had roads flooding, trees down, rivers overflowing and at one point 100mm of rain in just three hours not far outside the city. Temperatures have been down to 12/14°C (53-57°F), and the heating has had to be turned on again - something I've never known happen in May. Needless to say it's had a huge impact on agriculture - I read one report saying that a third of the area devoted to sweet corn (a major crop in this area) would have to be completely resown and that potato production was 40% down on usual.

And it's not been much better on the balcony. Seedlings which should by now be bursting out in growth are still just sat there, peering at me through the grey, cloudy gloom, as if to say you want us to grow at these temperatures ?? And seeds planted in April haven't germinated at all.

There is one advantage. The red spider mite must be loathing every minute of it. Two years ago they'd hit by May 12th. Last year it was May 20th. But this year I suspect we'll have a bit of a respite. Thank you, rain. Thank you.

Anyway, while I'm waiting for the rest, I've turned to pink. But whatever the intended colour scheme, there is one pink plant that I'd never be without - my Lychnis coronaria (Rose campion). I grew it from seed which I saved from my London garden several years ago, and it's bloomed regularly on the balcony ever since. I love the grey-green foliage and the stark contrast it presents with the flowers. This year (and I'm not sure why) it's suddenly grown exponentially into an enormous plant. And that in a container on the back balcony where I've had little success with other plants. Note the one weedy sweet pea that's come up behind it - despite the fact that I sowed liberally. But the lychnis is thriving - it's even dwarfing the hollyhock beside it.

I've got a lot of Lychnis seedlings coming on, and the plan is to fill that container with them. It would be nice to find a climber that would grow up the back though, to set them off.

So here's to pink. I offer it for this year's May Garden Blogger's Bloom Day. And long may it grace the balcony.

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Mad March

The weather last week was crazy. As forecast (see the Saturday post) it snowed. Not a lot here, but in areas not far from Milan, people were snowed in, and in the mountains they had record low temperatures for March : around -20°C (-4°F) if I remember correctly.

It didn't last long. A couple of days and we were back to bright blue skies and sunshine. But the temperatures have remained very, very strange. Yesterday it was 14°C (57°F) on the balcony at lunchtime. With -2°C (28°F) forecast for the night. Today it's been 16°C (61°F) but will drop to 1°C (33°F) tonight. That's a huge difference andI think I'm going to have some very confused plants.

It's also meant that I've been holding back on sowing. Though one set of seedlings doesn't seem to have been at all phased by the cold weather. This winter, I made the mistake of leaving my chrysanthemum container underneath the bird feeder. It seems that this year I'm going to be harvesting a great crop of millet ...

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The Big Chill

On the night I left Milan for the Christmas holidays, the temperature was forecast to drop to -14°C (7°F). That's unheard of here. Sometimes in January we might get -6°C (21°F), but that's about the limit.

There wasn't much I could do. The plants on the balcony were already covered in fleece and tucked up against the walls of the house. And quite honestly, I was too busy packing to worry.

But all through the holidays, it was at the back of my mind. What would I find when I got back? Would anything survive?

When I got back, pulling off the fleece to check was not a happy experience. In particular, the succulents had been decimated. The sedum seems to have pulled through, but my lovely, lovely money plant (Crassula ovata) has been frozen to death ...

as has the prickly pear ...

and the mesembrantheum. But at least that saves me having to decide whether to throw it out as I'd been thinking of.

I'm worried to about the aloe. The outer leaves have gone but the centre doesn't look too bad. Will it make it?

I've lost other plants too - the spider plants have been massacred ...

All these are plants which, with due protection, have always overwintered outside without problems. Yet, amazingly, the plants I was most worried about - the annuals that were hardly more than at seedling stage, and the more delicate perennials like my plumbago - all seem to have come through unscathed. I've lost a couple of hollyhocks, but the rest are all there. Even my chrysanthemums - in full bloom when I left. At first sight I thought I'd lost them ...

But look what's happening around the back...


In theory, the coldest period of the year is yet to come - in the next week or so. But fingers crossed that nothing will exceed the pre-Christmas period.

PS : Apologies for the time lapse since the last post. I have been swamped with work. But from now on, things will be back to normal - promise.

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Roll on November ...

This was the week that the temperature dropped 10°C overnight. Last Sunday I went to the garden centre wearing only a T-shirt (well, no - I had trousers on too, but you know what I mean...) Today I'm sitting at home with the heating on and I've still had to put on a long sleeved jumper (that's a sweater for anyone who lives west of County Kerry).

It started with two days of heavy winds. Wind is unusual in Milan, but very welcome - it blows away the pall of smog that usually envelops the city. And last week, the Foehn was blowing.

Now, I'm sure I've posted about the Foehn before - but I can't for the life of me find the post. Was it one I started and then deleted? Who knows. But apologies if you've read this before.

The Foehn is a wind which occurs around a mountain range. It has different names in different countries - the Helm wind in the UK, the Chinook in the US and Canada, the Bergwind in South Africa - and many, many more. Don't ask me to explain the details - it's something about the "different adiabatic lapse rates of moist and dry air." Yeah, well - perhaps that's why I deleted the post ...

It's a strong, gusty wind which in Milan usually brings down branches from trees and often the trees themselves. But it's a warm wind - when the Foehn blows the temperature usually rises.

So it was even more of a shock to wake up at five the next morning, freezing to death. The temperature had plummeted overnight, and the single blanket that we'd been using just wasn't enough any more.

The rest of the week has been a constant rush to catch up. Winter clothes have come out of the cupboards, plants have come in from the balcony (yes, don't worry - I'll get back to the plants in a minute), and on trips to the supermarket I'm no longer stocking up with salad but with beans, lentils, and other stuff for good hearty soups and casseroles.

The plants on the balcony don't like it any more than we do. The photos above are from ten days ago - the plumbago was still in full bloom, the sunflower was developing a good crop of seed heads and the petunias and marigolds were appreciating the cooler weather and looking better than they had in August. Now they're looking considerably shell shocked.

This is the sunflower today. I'll spare you the others - this is a family blog.

And ever the optimist in the garden, in the last few weeks, with temperatures around 20°C - that's 68°F - I was still doing some late sowing. Now with temperatures around 10°C/50°F, I suspect I was wasting my time.

But every season has its advantages and as one set of plants dies, another always takes over. Look at that photo of the sunflower again. See the chrysanths behind it? And see how many buds? Roll on November ...

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Death of a Tree

It started with the sound of a chainsaw. Tuesday is a day when I don't have to work early, but a high, whiny buzz coming from the front garden woke me at 8am. What was going on? Were they lopping the trees in the garden? They come and do it about every three years, but it shouldn't have been this year.

I peer over the balcony wrapped against the -3° temperature in an old dressing gown inherited from my mother - I am too ashamed to say how long ago. And looking undoubtedly like the mad woman of Milan. And see two men attacking the laurel tree in front of the appartment. Whaaat? It's perfectly healthy, and at only about 15 ft created no problems. So why?

I wake up husband and pounce - he's one of the tenant representatives for the condominium and is supposed to know what's going on. Why are they killing my tree?

One groggy eye opens and says (I've deleted the expletives) I've been in bed with the 'flu for a week, don't know and the way I'm feeling don't care, go ask the caretaker.

But first I grab my camera to record the crime. And go to the end of the balcony where I have a clearer view. And see the tree is down ...

Not cut down. Fallen down. Brought down by the weight of the snow heaped on the broad, flat leaves. Remember the last post and the photo of the tree covered in snow and forming a white hump outside the balcony? That was the laurel.

But the weight was too much. And the tree had simply toppled over, uprooting itself. I hadn't noticed the first time I looked, because the view from that end of the balcony is obscured by the hedge. And the tree had fallen against a lamp-post, propping itself up as if nothing was the matter.

The men worked for about half an hour. At the end, they loaded up the branches on a lorry and left. My lovely laurel is gone. Killed by the snow.

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Heat zones and hardiness zones

This was the week that temperatures on the balcony dropped to -3°C (26°F) and we had 40 cms (about 16 inches) of snow within 36 hours. That's more than I've seen in Milan for about 20 years - and the first time I've ever seen snow heaped up on the balcony. It is however well within the limits of our hardiness zone.

It seems that every US gardener knows what hardiness zone they're in. Yet the idea is much less common in Europe. It is possible to find out though, and backyardgardener.com links to maps showing not only the US, but also Europe ( this one from gardenweb.com is particularly good - click on the different countries to get an enlarged view of wherever you are in Europe, Australia, China and the States.

Knowing your hardiness zone isn't always much help though. First of all, because the categories seem to me to be extremely wide. We're in zone 8, which means that temperatures might go as low as -12°C. Well, yes I suppose they might. But they almost never do. If we have a week below freezing with a couple of days at -5 or -6, that's an exceptionally cold winter. Most years we never see temperatures drop far below freezing at all. Even this week we've mostly been around 0-2°.

One reason for that however is that we're in the middle of a city - where temperatures are always 2-3°C higher than the surrounding countryside. And that's another problem with hardiness zones - you need to take into account the individual factors of your garden : how exposed is it? If you're south facing, if you have nice sheltering walls, or if like me you garden on a balcony that receives warmth from the house, the official temperatures and those which your plants experience may be quite different. I've said before that I can get so-called annuals like petunias to survive the winter on the balcony just by covering them and placing them against the walls of the house. The conditions in the micro-climate of your own garden may be quite different from the "official" conditions of your zone.

However, the other problem is that hardiness zones only take into consideration the low, winter temperatures. I've said we're in zone 8 here - but so is much of Britain, and the type of plants that grow well here and in Britain are often quite different. We may have similar winter conditions, but the summer heat is another story.

In the US, it's also possible to find out your heat zone. The zones are based on how many days the temperature rises above 30°C / 86°F, and you can see how the zones are labelled at the site of the American Horticultural Society. But I can find nothing for any other part of the world. And as I lose far more plants to heat than cold, I'd like to know.

But for now, we're still coping with the snow.

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Well, the north wind did blow, and then we had snow ..

And when the north wind blows, we know about it. It sweeps down from Siberia, picks up the cold air of the Alps and then blasts down on us, usually bringing snow.

So we woke up on Wednesday morning to this, the second time this year.

It didn't last long - by mid morning it had turned to rain, and then it just teemed down for the rest of the week. A nuisance, but we escaped the problems that other areas have had. In the mountains people have been blocked in ski resorts because roads have been closed for fear of avalanches. Just outside Rome, 75,000 acres of farmland has been flooded while in the city the Tiber was at record levels and very close to bursting its banks - click on the link for a photo.

It's not unknown for the Tiber to flood - one article I read estimates that it happens every 50-100 years. But it's ironic that it happened just as EU leaders were meeting in Brussels to discuss measures aimed at reducing climate change.

Was it a success? It depends who you read. Yes, in the sense that it retained the threatened 20/20/20 policy : countries still agree to a target of cutting CO2 emissions by 20% by 2020, to reaching 20% use of renewable energy, and to a 20% improvement in energy efficiency. No, because of the concessions made to some of the countries with the biggest pollution problems.

With the economic crisis biting hard, industry is clearly lobbying harder than ever to protect itself against any measures which are going to cost it money. Under the original plan, all power plants were going to have to start buying "carbon allowances" from 2013, thus encouraging energy saving and a turn to cleaner sources. But for many plants this has now been reduced to paying for only 30% of their allowances at the beginning, the 100% target not being reached until 2020.

This mostly affects the poorer countries from the ex-"eastern bloc", many of which are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Yet these are exactly the countries which are the worst polluters.

It wasn't only the poorer countries though. Germany pushed for and obtained concessions, while Italy was at one point threatening to use its veto and block the whole process, objecting to the idea that it should be "only" Europe which was acting, while new economies like China and India continued undermining any effects that the European initiatives might have. Yet if the EU can't even get its own countries to agree to change, it's not clear why they expect others should happily climb on board.

So we have the same targets as before - but much weaker mechanisms for achieving them. That seems like a contradiction in terms to me, rather than the great victory that the Italians were proclaiming. The only attempt I've found at explaining how it might still happen was the BBC's cheery little comment that "CO2 emissions are likely to fall anyway if a prolonged recession brings significant plant closures". Erm ...

At the same time as the EU summit, there was a two-week a UN conference in Poznan in Poland - ironically, one of Europe's worst polluters. At first it seemed more positive. Al Gore was confident that the Obama government will have a far more active policy on preventing climate change than did the Bush government. Well, it certainly won't be less active, but apparently he's not going to think about it until at least the summer. Now, this certainly isn't something to be decided overnight - it's too important. but if you've known for a while that you might end up as president of the US, isn't it something that's important enough that you would already have thought about it? Especially when you know your predeccessor has already been dragging his feet for so long. Gore also pointed to the fact that some of the developing countries - like Brazil, Mexica and China - were coming on board, with pledges on restraining the rise in greenhouse gas emissions already in place.

But what has come out of both meetings is that the developing countries need money - money which the richer nations could provide but are often reluctant to do so. Some progress has been made - for example, Britain is providing £100m to help countries such as Indonesia reduce deforestation (see this article in The Independent). In addition, some funds have been provided to compensate poorer countries which have recently suffered from extreme weather conditions, such as flooding, for the impacts of climate change. But it's not enough - currently no more than $80m. And anyway, it's a different issue. It doesn't solve the problem.

Poznan is the half way stage in a two year process which will end with a conference in Copenhagen next year, and which is intended to be the "next Kyoto". Whether Poznan has been a positive step in this direction depends, again, on who you read. Hopefully, by then the States, unlike in Kyoto, will "on board". But will they be any more willing to go against the business lobby than Europe has been? And without strong commitment from the US and the EU, will the developing countries be interested?

Meanwhile, back to the weather. We had a short truce this morning. The torrential rain finally stopped - thank goodness as my son had a football match (US readers read "soccer") and would have been soaked as well as freezing to death. One is enough. But the forecast is for more heavy rain and snow, starting in the north and spreading south. I think we might just be heading for a white Christmas ...

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Wild Weather

The worst is almost over ... or at least, it should be. July is usually the hottest and stickiest month here in Milan, with combined temperatures and humidity regularly giving a perceived temperature of over 38°C (100°F) - sometimes well over. All day you're clammy and dehydrated, and at night it becomes impossible to sleep. Despite three or four tepid showers a day, you feel devoid of energy and irritable, can't work, can't think and want do do nothing but lie in front of a fan on full blast.

Well, that's me anyway - and most of the plants on the balcony. Some people, like my husband, revel in it. I flake, my plants droop pathetically, and he decides to spring clean the house. No accounting for tastes. Perhaps I should suggest he takes on the dead-heading and the staking and the 101 other jobs that I can't find the energy for.

In comparison with other years though, this July was better than usual. Air temperatures didn't ever go above about 36°(97°F), and the humidity was only a real problem for about ten days. In between hot spells, temperatures dropped to an almost pleasant 30°C (86°C) and the hottest, most humid days usually finished with a storm which brought the nighttime temperatures down.

But what storms. The north of Italy made the national news constantly during July as hailstorms, wind and torrential rain brought down trees and scaffolding, and flooded roads, houses and railway lines. The hail was sometimes as big as small icecubes. It hit the balcony plants hard , particularly those trailing over the balcony rails like the ivy-leaved pelargoniums and surfinia, whose flowers were ripped to pieces. And several times a crash in the night announced that yet another large pot had been blown over by a wind that here is called a tromba d'aria. The literal translation is blast of air, but it's usually translated as a tornado. However, I think a more accurate term is a downburst. It's a wind which arrives suddenly with no warning, and lasts for no more than about ten minutes, but in that time reaches gale-force strengths. We have them regularly and they can do a lot of damage. One arrived last night as we were sitting watching TV (OK, OK I admit it - Brothers and Sisters. In this heat that's about the maximum my intellect can manage) and within thirty seconds half the balcony had blown into the living room through the french doors. Ten minutes later there wasn't a whiff of breeze, but for the next half hour there was a thunderstorm and torrential rain. We found out this morning that the storm had brought down six large trees around the city, injuring two people, and again causing widespread flooding..

Weird weather we've been having...

As I said in my last post, marigolds blooming in December is a sure sign that the weather must be mild, though it's hard to be sure as I can't find a complete list of temperatures for this month so that I can compare them with official averages. It's not been all warm weather though - there was one day when it plunged about ten degrees overnight - just the sort of drop that plants don't like. And we also had three days of torrential rain - not unusual for Milan in November. It never drizzles here. We go for months without a drop, and then when it does come it just pours and pours, so that roads flood, cellars flood and occasionally so does the underground, causing chaos everywhere.

But the strangest event this month was towards the middle of the month when the foehn suddenly hit. The foehn is a warm wind that comes across the mountains - warm because as the air drops down the side of the mountain, the increasing atmospheric pressure heats it up. It produces gusts of wind than can get quite strong. this time it got up to around 90km per hour in some places, and was about 80 when it hit Milan.


It had been fine when I went to work in the morning - but when I came out at lunchtime I had to fight my way through it to get home to my son, who was home from school sick that day. The wind had blown away all the smog, so there was a bright blue sky, warm sunshine and in the background you could see the Alps - something which only happens when it's windy enough to clear the pollution. The strongest of the winds happened just after I got home. The trees in the garden had just reached the peak of their autumn colours, so of course the leaves were ready to come off, and there was what would have been a wonderful photo of trees bent double and the air full of a stream of leaves blowing from left to right across the garden. Needless to say, the batteries in my camera were dead.


When I next went out on the balcony it was ankle deep in leaves, and I'm still finding them tucked behind the occasional pot.


Will the warm weather go on? The forecasts say no and that we're not going to have a mild winter again like last year. We'll see. The temperature has dropped, but it was still nine degrees out there this morning. If we do get normal temperatures, I should need to cover everything with fleece in about ten days. last year I didn't really need to at all, and although I did cover things as a precaution while I was away for Christmas, the fleece came off pretty soon afterwards. This year who knows. We shall see.

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Spring has Sprung

Spring arrived with the beginning of the month and we've had blue skies, bright sunshine and temperatures around 20°C - that's about 68°F - all week. The forsythia is out, and so are all the flowering trees, and the grass is full of little forget-me-nots and violets. The photo is one of the trees in the garden outside the front balcony, taken this morning.

I celebrated by spring cleaning both balconies and putting all the containers back into their summer positions. The perennials and bienniels are all back in growth, and the bulbs are pushing through. I didn't plant my daffodils till December, otherwise they'd probably be out by now- they're all in bud and almost ready. The bulbs include one tub which is going to be a surprise - I forgot to label it, can't remember what I put in there and so far can't recognise it from the shoots. Allium perhaps??? I know I meant to get some, but can't remember if I actually did. A new venture for me this year is some agapanthus. It's not done much so far - there are a couple of small shoots but nothing very exciting. Again, it went in late.

And then I got on with sowing all the annuals for the summer. For some of the more delicate ones, I'm a good month ahead of last year, but with such high temperatures it didn't seem worth holding back. Please, please don't let it change.

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Cover Up

A couple of weeks ago I was talking about how we were having temperatures of 18°C. Well, within a couple of days they were warning that a big freeze was on it's way, and forecasting snow and sub zero temperatures. So I immediately rushed out, tucked everything next to the walls of the house and covered it all with fleece.

We did have cold weather one day - I think it dropped to -1° and for about three minutes a sort of sleety snow came down before it turned back into rain. But then the temperature went back up to about 6 or 7° and has stayed there ever since. I'm in two minds whether to uncover everything again or not. This is, of course what the balcony usually looks like in the winter. It's usually covered up from about mid December until mid or late February, or even later. It's not impossible that we have snow in March. I think I'll wait a bit and see. When I put the fleece on I noticed that the flower buds were already well formed on my stock - I hope I won't lose them all.

If you thought you were in the wrong place when you came into the blog, you're not - in a desperate attempt to avoid work one day, I changed the template. I lost my What flower are you? button, which I got from Hanna's site, and had to go back and do it again (click on the button if you want to try the quiz yourself). And lo and behold, I'm no longer a daisy - I've turned into an echinea. Not sure why. I had a second look at the questions, tweaked a bit just in case I'd been flattering myself before, but no - I always came out as an echinacea. A pity, as I rather identified with my daisy, but the colour fits quite nicely into the sidebar ...

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Primroses and hurricanes

The crazy weather continues and half of Europe has had a hurricane. It stopped at the Alps and we’ve not had so much as a breeze here, but the TV pictures have been horrific. I’ve just done a round of UK blogs to see if anyone had posted about it, but it’s too early. They’re probably still all out clearing up.

Instead we’ve been basking in the sunshine. Temperatures were 27°C in Turin yesterday – that’s about 80°F. We “only” had 18°C (about 65°F) and today it’s dropped to 14° but that’s still spring temperatures. In January I would expect it to be somewhere between -6 and +5°. The plants don’t know if they’re coming or going (literally) and, according to the TV, yesterday there were butterflies fluttering around. I went out to do a general tidy up this morning (and to enjoy the sunshine) and saw that I’ve got annuals from last year – nasturtiums, alyssum, petunias and so on - that are still going strong, and that loads of stuff which has self-seeded is starting to come through. I’d be tempted to start sowing other stuff – except that they say there’s snow on the way for next week. The sudden drop in temperature will probably kill off a lot of things, so I’ll cover everything with fleece on Monday in an attempt to lessen the shock.

I have succumbed to the early spring feeling though – I went out and bought some primroses . They’re probably my favourite spring flower, and when I go and buy them I always feel that the growing year is starting up again. I have to get them each year from the nursery as, try as I might, I can’t keep them over the summer – the heat and direct sunlight of the balcony is just too extreme for them. Last year I made a special effort to keep them cool and shaded, and actually got one through to September. But in order to shade it I had to hide it so well that I then forgot about it for a week – and found it eaten up by red spider mite.

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Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! First of all, here are the answers to the Christmas quiz (because I know you can’t wait) : 1b (my Christmas sprouts had obviously been well frosted, because they were delicious), 2c (don't try this at home), 3a, 4c, and 5 mistletoe.

I hope you had a good Christmas holiday. One person who certainly did was Trillium, who won the BBC Gardener of the Year award. Well, she really won it in the autumn, but couldn’t tell anyone until the programme was shown last Saturday. Luckily she had the sense to keep a secret blog describing what happened during the days of the competition and it’s now on-line. As it’s in blog format, you have to go back to the earliest posts and read it in date order, but it’s well worth the scrolling. You can also find out about it on the BBC website. And just in case anyone is wondering, Joe Swift - the presenter of the programme - is not, as far as I know, any relation. But he does seem to have the Swift chin, not to mention a very similar hairline to other males of the family. In fact he bears a decided resemblance to my brother .... perhaps I should do some research.



My Christmas was great. As usual we went to Aachen in Germany where my sister-in-law lives. We usually spend half the time tobogganing, but this year it was so mild, there was no chance. Except for Christmas Day when it suddenly, and temporarily, dropped to minus 3°. As it had been plus 8° the day before, the condensation just covered all the trees and plants with ice. These photos were taken on Christmas morning, when we went out for a walk after we’d opened our presents.

But not the next one. Before I went away, I decided to move all my plants next to the walls of the house, and cover the most delicate with fleece, just in case the temperature dropped while we were gone. And look what I found – a petunia in bloom on December 21st. If that’s not evidence for climate change, I’m not sure what is.



I had two gardening related presents this year. Firstly, a calendar focusing on a different plant each month and the herbal remedies associated with it. It’s in German so I’ll have to get my dictionary out, but I’ll let you know month by month what it says. And the second one was from some friends who gave me this lovely set of cards and envelopes, homemade with photos of flowers from their own garden. A super idea and one I shall copy next year.

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Blogger strikes again ?

Has anyone else had problems with their comments recently? For some reason I'm not getting E-mail notification of mine any more ( I won't blame Blogger for that - I probably clicked on the wrong button and blocked the address instead of cancelling the message or something), but I'm also having trouble publishing them. In particular, the system "ate" one message from Lou Laz, so I thought I'd answer her question here.

Lou Laz wrote saying that she was going to be in Milan and wanted to buy seeds while she was here. It's not that easy. As you'll see when you arrive, Milan is all apartment blocks - almost no-one has a garden, and consequently all that the garden centres, supermarkets and street markets stock are fully grown plants, houseplants and in summer balcony plants mainly. If you go to the outskirts and to the roads leading out of town, you'll find more garden centres catering also to people with gardens, but in town the only place that I know that has a really good stock is Fratelli Ingegnoli of Viale Pasubio (they have another centre too, in Via Mecenate - depends which area you're staying in). Their website is here.



Back to the balcony ..... The mild weather has really made a difference this year. By now, I usually have everything stacked against the wall of the house and covered in fleece, but this year not only has it not been necessary, but also everything is still flowering in a way unheard of for December. All the photos here were taken during the last few days. It was the warmest November for thirty years - so warm that they weren't even able to use artificial snow on the ski slopes of the Alps until just this last week or so, let alone hope for the real thing. The four day weekend which we had last week is usually the start of the ski season, but this year there was no chance. As the whole economy of that area depends on the ski trade, it's a big problem. The temperature has dropped a bit now - we had our first frost the other day, though it's back to 7° today - but still nothing like usual.

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