It's a new year in the Lake District Garden

Not much has been happening in the garden lately. Rain, snow, frost and general winter weather has made it an unattractive proposition.

This week however we had a couple of days that felt like spring, so we've been out tidying- sweeping up the magnolia leaves from the path, and pruning the jasmine.
I expect it's quite the wrong thing to do, to hack away at a jasmine in January, but I'd not had the heart to cut it back in autumn. The deer found it in December and thought the last of the leaves looked tasty, so we were left with long shoots of jasmine waving around in the wind.

We need to put a load of compost on the Jasmine now. A few years of having a jasmine with lots of leaves but no flowers have taught me that you need to put more compost than you think would be necessary on the jasmine root to make sure you get those sweet scented flowers in summer.