The weather has been kind these last weeks of spring. Gentle rain and enough of it here to refresh the burgeoning in this crossover season. Spring to summer, the garden moving fast and demanding daily vigil. All around us, the meadows are awash with meadow buttercup after the wet winter and the conditions they favour. Great swathes shine gold, to throw light and you can see why when you cup a single flower in your hand and marvel at its burnish. 

I don’t let the buttercups into the garden, though they lap to the very boundaries in the blurry margins, so that your eye is easily drawn and allowed to travel. These between places where the gardening is lighter allow us to shapeshift between the cultivated and the wild so that you cannot see where our hand has had the influence. The meadows have their reign and will not always accept the introductions we gardeners think might work there, but we continue to experiment. Sometimes it takes time to find the niche, and we have done just that on the slopes where the crab apples have been underplanted with bulbs that have a wilding quality.