08 April 2025

Or rather, why we haven’t done it yet.

Last year about this time, we explained why we don’t cut back all the old plant stems in the autumn, as people used to do to make their flowerbeds look emptier and tidier over the winter (spoiler: it’s because insects and small mammals need places to hibernate in, and dead leaves on the ground and hollow stems in the air seem to be just the thing).

We have cut most of the old stems down now, but we’re still not weeding thoroughly – this isn’t just laziness! A lot of the flowers we encourage here are ones that have self-seeded, and too many of them haven’t germinated yet. So if we weed to bare soil between plants, we’re destroying a lot of plants we might like to keep.

The warm weather over the last couple of weeks has really brought a lot of plants on faster than usual, so we’ll be starting to tidy up in earnest for the rest of this month, and sowing seeds where we find any bare patches.

And perhaps most importantly, we’ll be lifting even the useful wild flowers like Geranium lucidum [find photo] in the third bed up from the memorial itself – that’s the bed the preschool children will be planting their peas out in when they come back after the Easter holidays, and we need it to be ready for them then.

We’ll leave a couple of plants – there’s a large viper’s bugloss which will be a real bee magnet later in the year – but mostly we’ll be clearing more space for them. It’s a big ask to avoid digging up lots of plants by mistake when you’re only 2 or 3 years old!