Ne'er cast a clout till May be out

Funny old saying, this is what it means :-
'Ne'er cast a clout.. simply means, never discard your (warm winter) clothing. 'till May be out', which means until May is ended!!
Truer words could not have been spoken, we had a frost last night, so had to wrap up the new bed.

The view from my bedroom window at 6am this morning. Frost on the roofs and nice and sunny

sadly the sun did not last and it is pretty chilly and I require a jumper, which is most unusual for me.

My Gloriosa whcihwas transplanted to the new bed has deteriorated,usually when you transplant you cut off a lot of the leaves so the dug up roots don't have to support to much leaf growth. I did think about it when I moved it but being still on a massive learning curve with 'Arid Bed Gardening' I didn't and as you can see it is looking very sad for itself. So after a chat with my mentor it got the chop.

Looking rather sad now I think,

and maybe not as healthy as I thought!
Both hubby and I stop and look at this bed every time we walk up and down the garden, he thinks, as I said before, 'its the best I have ever done', which makes me chuckle as I remember many years ago suggesting doing a bed similar to this and he was dead against it!!!

I'm asked why I grow what I grow, and its simply a challenge, the cottage garden bed you can just see to the right in the next picture, grows itself. Although my garden is south facing with a 6ft fence plus

a beech hedge which grows about 2ft above the fence ( I have spoken to my gardener, who is also the neighbours gardener and when he does their hedge he said he will do his best to get it down to fence height!!!) because of this from about mid day this side of the garden is in shade, I have always struggled as to what to grow here, I can't grow tropicals because it is too cold, so it sort of evolved and I 'plonked' plants in and never took them out, and it just grows each year, easy. I don't do easy. I can spend hours outside or in the greenhouse, what I do I don't know but I love it!!