After the cherry blossom season comes the cherry petal season.

Adrian and Ingrid both wanted to be involved in the plant shopping, so we ended up with perhaps a less coherent planting than I usually do. I picked some, Adrian picked some, Ingrid picked some… And some of the plants I had in mind were out of stock at Ulriksdal, so I had to replace them.

Ingrid helped me with the grouping and layout, and then we went back to get more ground cover plants to fill in the gaps.

I’ve always wanted a hellebore in the garden, and now circumstances came together to give me one: I have a shade planting that I’ll be passing daily – and the plant nursery was advertising large, home-grown hellebores.

Cherry blossoms against a cloudy sky.

The space to the right of the front stairs is complicated. If it was just a rectangular patch of ground, I’d have no trouble filling it – a few bushes, ground cover under them, perennials between and in front, maybe some spring-flowering bulbs here and there. But there is the access hatch to the crawlspace under the house, to begin with. We don’t need to get in there often, but we also cannot block it off completely. And there is the water tap, which needs to be even more accessible.

Ideally I’d have have something pretty and green growing in the entire space. But I don’t know of any shade-tolerant ground cover that would stand up to frequent trampling, so for the sake of practicality I’m putting paving stones in the parts where I think we’ll want to walk the most. Wall-to-wall (that is, house wall to retaining wall) in front of the tap, and a shallower bit in front of the hatch, that I’ll hide behind some greenery. To keep the overall impression natural, rather than sleek and paved, I’m leaving gaps here and there between the stones to fill in with ground covering plants.

Laying out irregularly shaped paving stones in an aesthetically pleasing way is hard. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with no right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, where each piece weighs several kilos. The balance between “pleasantly irregular” and “sloppy” was tricky. It took me three hours of work, and I was knackered by the end of it.

Bushes and perennials that take a long time to wake in spring make me anxious. The buds on some bushes are barely visible, while others have new leaves the size of a finger joint. Some perennials are already knee-high, but others haven’t even broken through the crust of the soil. It makes me worry that maybe they’ve died over the winter.

In my eternal project of removing lawn and replacing it with better things, I’ve now tackled the bit just in front of the house, to the right of the stairs. It’s a hassle to mow, with rocks peeking out of the ground along the edges as well as a large rock just at the corner. And it’s really boring to look at. For a spot that we walk past every time we come home, it really isn’t well utilized.

First step: remove the lawn. I was expecting this to be relatively arduous, based on past experience. The soil here turned out to be light and dry, not at all like the clay to the left of the stairs, and the grass is thin and weak. So I got all this done much faster than I had thought.

Next step: figure out what to plant. I had this spot marked as deep shade in my head, but it was full sun while I was digging this afternoon. But of course that’s because the cherry tree is bare right now, and will change in just a few weeks.

Bought and planted some spring flowers for the porch, for the first time in several years, in yet another step to getting back to the way life used to be.

The first truly warm day this spring. Short sleeves, sandals, and lunch out in the sun. And several hours of spring cleaning in the garden.

Spring is not complete without a photo of Viburnum flowers.

This is the season when not a day goes by without me passing some part of the garden and being amazed about all the beautiful things emerging there. Truly the best time of the year.