A week or so...

 The Laburnum walk at Bodnant gardens in North Wales was loooking spectacular last week when we visited on our way across Wales to Crug Farm Nursery.

I noticed this unusual adiantum fern growing at the garden at Crug plants with its red flushed foliage when young. The owner Sue couldn't identify it but a bit has gone off to Holland to be worked on, I have since found it I think in a fern book, but the name escapes me at the moment.

In Betwys-y-coed this beautiful hankerchief tree Davidia Involucrata was growing over a stone wall on the side of the road just a few hundred yards from this unusual fern below. I think there must have been an impressive victorian garden on there as there were several interesting plants around including a dryopteris wallichiana with its fantastic dark spine visible amongst a clump of lady ferns. The fern below I have never seen before and had a fantastic fleshy colour to the young fronds.

May

I thought I would start with a couple of shots of trees in the garden. The horse chestnuts shown above are looking fantastic in the garden at the moment, the nicely pruned bottom of the one of the right is kept perfectly flat by the sheep.

Below is a picture of a tree I have been meaning to photograph for years now. I think it is one of the most beautiful trees there is, it's a Norway maple. Of course the time I eventually get round to taking its portrait it is looking just green and treeish, but it changes colour so many times in the year a diary of this may as well start when it is looking its least interesting. Shame also that there is a bonfire waiting to be lit beneath it.

Now to my favourite Aqualegia 'longisima' which has just opened its first flower the others still look like comets shooting around it. Of all the hundreds of aqualegia species and hybrids it is one of the most understated and elegant. Understated that is in colour and elegant with its overly long spurs flying back behind it.

The primulas are still looking fantastic around the secret pond, such a beautiful shaded spot in the garden and a suprise to all that walk through the shrubs to emerge with the crimson carpet that they create hovering above the ground, they must have been flowering for the best part of a month already.

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Adiatum aleuticum, one of the most beautiful of all the ferns, small, delicate and a good grower to boot. The smaller varieties such as Adiatum aleuticum 'Subpumilum' with fronds that stand on 10cm long stems is even better in windy locations which all maidenhairs struggle with.

I will finish with a shot of the wonderful pattern made by the leaves of the flag iris's, as fresh and healthy looking as is possible, I meant to take an arty, abstract, close up of the patterns the stems create but instead settled for an average shot with a duck at the bottom.