planting winter aconites

winter aconites

Plants carry with them associations and memories.

Our garden is stuffed full of such loaded plants: the walnut given to us by Trev and Linda; the skimmia japonica planted along the drive taken from cuttings from the original plant grown by mum and dad in Wilford; or the acer negundo 'flamingo' re-homed from Sarah's.

And yet more associations and memories were added yesterday.

Our dear friend Sue Shardlow lost her fight with cancer recently. She had never had the opportunity to join us at Cordwood and we know that she would have loved it here.

After her funeral, I asked her husband (our pal Kris) if he would like to join us planting winter aconites along our drive in Sue's memory. Sue enjoyed gardening.

Aconites can be rather fussy so we thought that we'd begin with a trial planting of 100 bulbs this year. We expect them to flourish and in which case we will add further plantings in coming years.
Flowering before other plants, our hope is that they go on to carpet our drive on both sides and in doing so bring thoughts of Sue each time we see them.

Here's our little team of planters: Kris, 3T; Lindsey, us - and little visitor Max.

Thanks especially to Naturescape who ensured that the bulbs were here on time for our planting.