The long Easter weekend is superbly timed for gardeners. All they need is some tolerable weather and in Britain, an end to the constant rain. In the right conditions, this weekend is the time to catch up, clear up, plant and re-engage. Gardens may seem as if they have been on fast-forward, although frost may yet hold them in cold storage.
So far, the fast-forwarding is remarkable. “The primroses were over”, begins Watership Down, Richard Adams’ classic tale of post-Easter bunnies on the move. They were forced to migrate for a still-topical reason, plans to build houses all over their greenfield home in the country. Primroses, my favourite British wild flowers, have revelled in this non-winter. At Easter they are a joy, especially on shaded banks in country lanes. However, they will be over in a week’s time, long before the season when Adams imagined his rabbits migrating in the early 1970s.
In gardens, I let primroses seed wherever they wish but I also cherish named varieties. In first lockdown I bought a selected creamy-white one called Devon Cream. It has been well worth the knockdown price of £1, charged at its despairing nursery’s gate.
I do not want Easter bunnies in my garden. They are a menace to emerging tulips and to a still-spongy lawn on which they play bunny golf at night and never replace the divots. At least they cannot reach the flowers on tall magnolias, which are having a superb year too. They have been up to four weeks earlier than in the 1980s.
One of my favourites is pink-flowered Magnolia x loebneri Leonard Messel, which grows and flowers even on alkaline soil. I first saw its narrow strap-shaped flowers in full beauty in the Sir Harold Hillier gardens in Hampshire, where I went for consolation in the first week of April 1982, when parliament had just voted for war against Argentina over the Falklands. The pink flowers were opening, whereas this year’s buds have been flowers for three weeks already.
My two most accelerated surprises are calendulas, or orange pot marigolds, in flower three months early beside London’s Little Venice canal, and rounded heads of scented white flower on Viburnum burkwoodii. This viburnum is a valiant shrub, even in half-shade, and is good, too, against an east-facing wall. In the 1990s it used to flower in mid-May and persist for a fortnight, consoling me when I returned home from the wonders of the Chelsea Flower Show in the third week of that month.
Viburnum burkwoodii is already in flower, the result of a jump start which confounds me. If you grow it or its scented relatives, check this weekend for coarse upright stems emerging from the root stock on to which all such viburnums are commercially grafted. Their different leaves and texture are easily recognisable and they should be cut off at ground level because they weaken the grafted shrub and spoil its shape if they are left, as often, unpruned.
Otherwise, restrain the urge to prune almost everything else, except long thin stems waving free of the older growth on a wisteria. Redirect your energy to weeding. This year weeds too are ahead of themselves at ground level and need careful Easter attention. Tufts of uninvited grass are already growing vigorously in flower beds and should be removed along with budding chickweed and little white-flowered bitter cress, or cardamine, which is ahead of its season after the mild winter and the wet that it enjoys. Root it out now because it runs quickly to seed after flowering and scatters itself far and wide. If your flower bed seems forbiddingly wet, lay a board on it and stand on it to do the work. Even on clay soil it will spread your weight, making your imprint much easier to loosen when you finish.
When you go Easter plant shopping, try to look ahead and not be seduced by what is in flower. In a week it will be over and you will have a long wait for flowers next year. Look instead for unflowered plants of the newish small buddleias, the Buzz series being excellent in late summer, and the long-flowering, low-growing weigelas, also recent arrivals.
Weigela All Summer Red is one to track as it deserves its name. So does Choisya White Dazzler, which is already showing white flowers but is truly able to repeat in autumn. It is evergreen and only up to four-foot high, a recent winner for keen gardeners. I find it hardy in a back yard or anywhere sheltered from freezing wind.
My personal icons for this Easter are rather different: they relate to Greece, not Israel. In Athens the Museum of Cycladic Art is staging an excellent exhibition, extended until April 23, about A Day that Changed the World. The day is not Easter Sunday. It is August 2 338BC, the date of the great battle of Chaeronea, where King Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, defeated an army of Greeks, led by Athens and Thebes, and became political master of the Greek states.
Their freedom indeed died on the battlefield and as a result Philip prepared to invade Asia, a campaign which his son Alexander then carried as far as India. The exact course of the battle remains unclear, but since the 1880s Greek archaeologists have discovered some of those who died in it. Several of their skeletons are on display in Athens for the first time.
On a recent Sunday I stood by the famous Lion Monument at Chaeronea, built on the site of a mass burial of 254 warriors, evidently members of the Thebans’ crack infantry unit, the famous Sacred Band. A few days before my visit, the Greek parliament had voted to legalise same-sex civil marriage, provoking furious denunciation by voices in the Greek Orthodox Church.
The later Greek author Plutarch, a citizen of Chaeronea, remarks that “it is said” that the Theban Sacred Band of 300 were bonded as homosexual lovers. Most of their modern historians accept this information as true. As I stood above their skeletons, buried without weapons in regular rows, I learnt that two of them were found to have been buried while holding hands. Among the gravestones of Chaeronea’s nearby museum, pink flowers of Anemone coronaria were showing as if in tribute.
On the Macedonians’ leftwing, led into battle by young Alexander, some of the Macedonian dead were cremated with weapons and breastplates. In Athens, the exhibition shows a remarkable extra: 30 clay holders shaped like flower buds, found in the mass grave, with holes for a connecting wire, linking them into one or two wreaths. Colouring still showed on these clay “buds”, which had holes in their tips too, some of which may have held real flowers. After the cremation, the wreath or wreaths were laid beside some of the dead, probably because these Macedonians had gone into battle wreathed with flowers.
I wonder which buds they were wearing in August. Their wreaths are such a touching tribute to flowers, their use and resonance, one which spurs me on this Easter as I bring my flowery garden back from the dead.
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