• Dig in green manures during good weather in preparation for planting out in a few weeks time

• If you need to move evergreen plants such as camellias or box, now is a good time to do it

• Start sowing tender plants in a heated propagator

• Plant onion sets

• Tidy mint plants and dress with compost to encourage strong new shoots

Top Left : A pure white camellia (name long forgotten) has a gently weeping habit which adds to its charms

Top Right: Crocus Ruby Glow is a cultivar of  tommassinianus with richer colouring

Mid Left: A  carpet of Crocus tommassinianus – in this morning’s warm sun it was humming with bees

Mid Right:  Pots of iris reticulata tucked in to sunny cormers of the garden are now in full flower

Bottom Left:  After weeks of inactivity, the gutter-sown peas are on the move

Bottom right: In the greenhouse a pot of Anemone Mr Fokker has sent up its first bloom

Andrew has tidied up the soft fruit beds and mulched them with well-rotted manure and  dug one bed after spreading more manure on it in readiness for the potatoes.

I’ve usually pruned the hydrangeas long before now, but I kept holding off in the hope of warmer weather.  I think the time has now come, otherwise their  leaves will be unfurling beneath last year’s dessicated flowerheads.

Walking down the road to do some shopping, I discovered a team of council contractors bent on horticultural murder in the grounds of our 14th century church.  What hadn’t been ripped from the ground had been brutally hacked back. I have a horrible feeling that what was previously a shrubbery of hydrangeas and fuchsias will be replaced by supermarket-style low-maintenance planting. Thank goodness the lovely rose that I have previously taken cuttings from has survived, after a fashion.  I shall take my secateurs down there and right the wrongs that have been done to it.  This type of massacre is happening throughout the country as skilled gardening teams are made redundant and replaced by contractors whose main aim is to do the job as quickly as possible.