Hello and welcome back to my blog! Happy Spring 2025, too!
Today’s post is focused on The Suntrap again and continues on from my last post which showed a run-through of the pruning I have carried out to the hydrangea to change it into a multi-stemmed tree:
Read my last post here: The Suntrap: Creating a hydrangea tree
I’ve been continuing making more changes in The Suntrap by adding new planting and I’ve been eagerly watching some of the other planting starting to wake up for the growing year ahead. I hope you enjoy reading this post 🙂
I will also be back tomorrow morning as usual with another post!
Table of contents
New shoots: the garden is waking up
If you read my blog, you will know that I recently moved some of the planting from The Woodland Garden into the shadier section of The Suntrap. This was because I needed more space to put my compost bay in The Woodland Garden:
The plants that I moved in The Suntrap included:
- Ferns x 2
- Pink astilbe x 3
I also added a new plant, which was a little acer called ‘Little Princess’, which had been sitting in my greenhouse over the Winter so that it was protected.
The last time I wrote about the above plants in February 2025, they were looking like this:
Acer ‘Little Princess’
In the space of a few weeks since then, the little acer has begun to leaf out:
I can’t wait to see how this little acer grows this year!
Pink Astilbe
The pink astilbe is also beginning to sprout new shoots:
I really like this little bed in the shadier area of The Suntrap and I think all of the contrasting foliage shapes are going to work really well together.
A new Californian Lilac
In the last week, I also planted a new Californian lilac (Ceanothus arboreus ‘Trewithen Blue’), to train up part of the back wall to provide evergreen structure. This has been planted to the left of the hydrangea tree.
To grow the ceanothus up the wall, I fixed eyelets and horizontal wires to the curved wall for training the ceanothus. I will be continuing to add more wiring over the next few weeks to the other sections of the wall.
I have grown ceanothus before and can recall how beautiful the flowers were and how loved they were by the bees. Already, the flowers on this ceanothus are starting to bloom:
That’s all for today’s shorter post. See you tomorrow morning at 10am for another post, where I will show you some of the new planting I have been adding to The Fruit Garden 🙂
Until then, happy gardening!
The Charming Nook 
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