Partridges with a Pear Tree

Some of our wonderful friends from choir clubbed together and bought us a generous sum of garden centre vouchers.  The card read "To fund a pear tree for the Partridges!" and so today we followed instructions and headed to the garden centre :)

It's a dwarf variety so can stay in a pot on the patio and is self-pollinating and will fruit.

Obviously it's a bit twiggy now but I have high hopes for it and the picture on the label looks great!

The vouchers also covered the cost of a pot for it to live in so I went for one of these RHS ones which I've been coveting for quite some time!  They do it in various colours but the blue one matches the rest of my garden pots :) 

Whilst we were at the garden centre, we also bought a little box plant for the front porch - it looks very smart next to our lovely red door, we think:

Potting up done, I decided to stay in the garden until dusk fell.  Things are slowly coming to life!

My Mum and Dad came over for lunch today and Mum encouraged me to be brutal and get on with pruning the various roses in the garden - there are lots of new shoots and leaves so if I didn't do it soon it would be even harder to bring myself to do it!  Being tough with plants doesn't come easily to me - I'm far more like my Dad who is a proper softy and would rather leave roses to grow wild and free!  Anyway my Mum said "they can get in line or get out" and with this in my mind along with a friend's wisdom that if you kill a plant you can always buy another, I got out my brand new pruning shears and got stuck in...

Rose #1 beforehand:

Rose #1 after pruning:

Admittedly I could have been more brutal, but I think I did a pretty good job for a first attempt - fingers crossed it doesn't shrivel up and die, now!  There is still plenty of promising new growth left:

I also took my shears to the MAHOOSIVE buddleia (actually there are about three mahoosive buddleias, this is just one of them).  I didn't take a "before" photo so here is one of it from a few weeks ago:

It now looks like this:

Impressively brutal, huh!  I actually need to take out that whole thick stem, but it was too thick for my shears and needs a saw - Ian says he'll help me with it tomorrow.

All this pruning made a bit of a mess, it won't all fit in the garden waste bin so I'll take it to the tip tomorrow.  Cue garden selfie:

Pruning done I moved on to more general clearance work, the eastern side of the garden is covered with this ground-covering plant, I have no idea what it is but it is a pain in the backside:

And in amongst that are strawberry plants.  Of course.

Anyway it's a right old mess and will be an ongoing task, I reckon.

Other assorted photos I took include the flower of the annoyingly twiggy jasmine plant, which is not at all what I expected.  Is everyone still sure this is a jasmine?!

My snapdragon (antirrhinum) plant which I brought with me from the flat (actually it's second generation as it seeded from the original one).  Snapdragons remind me of my Grandad so this one is sort of in memory of him.

And this plant, which is a sedum I think, which had beautifully captured some water droplets:

Around 6pm Ian came out and suggested that as it was getting dark (hooray for it staying lighter longer!) perhaps I wanted to come inside and have some dinner?  I was pretty knackered so agreed...