After a rain shower a couple of days ago, my little courtyard garden here in Lewes smelt fragrant with mingling rose perfumes. A familiarly sensuous experience in the Summer months but highly unusual for mid-November. Here in Britain, we are having the warmest November for a hundred years and, just for a moment, I am putting to one side gloomy thoughts about global warming to enjoy the flower show supplied by my contrasted array of David Austin roses. Not long ago on here I was lamenting what I thought were going to be the last roses of Summer but now it looks as if they will still be blooming for Christmas.

If any of you remember my reluctant battle against a clematis invasion here in this very small garden, after I had slaughtered my crop in mid-Summer in the interests of space, I thought I had seen the last of them – no chance, clematis is one heck of a survivor.

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I think I must have a destructive streak because I always love this time of year in my small town garden in Lewes in Southern England. It is when I get out the secateurs and cut down all my clematis plants to the ground.

I have lived with their dead wood all winter but now that life is surging back into these wonderful plants, we are told to get brutal with them so that they flower where you want them and not 100 feet in the air.

It is a very satisfying job……

..not just because it is great being back outside in the garden and it is fun cutting down wood but also because hacking down the old plants reminds me of what they will be like once the summer arrives. Gardening is all about expectation.

The post The gardening season begins here in Lewes and my secateurs are out and ready. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.