Friday 25 February 2011

February cheer


What an exciting week in the garden, though you wouldn’t know it on first inspection.

A drab, cold and grey February week in Kent — quite depressing, to be honest — with apparently nothing going on. But underground...what potential energy is building to a peak! It feels like the garden’s full of little incendiary devices everywhere...waiting to explode.

Already snowdrops and crocuses are livening up the scene across the neighbourhood — in my garden the tulip foliage is forcing its way out of the ground with no little force. Buds are swelling everywhere I look — from the hawthorn in the hedgerows I run past, to the red-stemmed Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’, annoyingly remind me I should have moved it to its planned final location over winter when it was dormant. I know it’s only a few weeks till those dual harbingers of spring in our garden, the snowy mespilus Amelanchier larmarckii and Emma’s Magnolia stellata, are resplendent in their full, fresh white-flowered glory.

And if that wasn’t enough, it’s nearly March, which means...seed time!

Friday 18 February 2011

New beginnings


After many months of dreaming and planning – not to mention many a long conversation with friends and family – a date has been set for the launch of grow. A new gardening business in north west Kent, grow will launch in the first week of July 2011. Having given my current workplace a generously long notice period, they’ve responded in kind by extending their best wishes and support through the first few months, which is a bonus.

I’m now free to plan in earnest, drawing together the many scribbled notes from various notebooks into a clearly articulated vision, in the form of a business plan, a marketing strategy, and numerous supporting pieces of printed and online collateral. It’s a real opportunity to focus all my mental and physical energy into something in which I'm not only really passionate about, but also have the opportunity to influence.

Can’t wait.