Hello lovely person!

March musings for you include; vibrant and wildlife friendly hedging, a fragrant forest frippery, speckled chocolate, golden trumpets, and a second chance.

Gardening tips for March

Bare root plants are much cheaper than container grown ones you see in garden centres. If you're buying online you'll likely pay cheaper postage too, as they're less bulky than plants in pots.

So what are bare root plants? They're dug up from the ground just before they're sold, so they don't have a big ball of compost around the roots. The roots are, er, bare.

Apart from the money you'll save, once they're planted they often establish quicker too. Which means you'll be enjoying abundant foliage and flowers sooner.

Roses and hedging plants are often sold bare root but the season will be ending soon, so here are some super reliable places who sell top quality plants.

Sea buckthorn (in the photo above) is adored by blue tits who scavenge all manner of juicy grublings from the branches to feed to their hungry babies in spring.

Fragrant musings from the library of scent: A Walk in the Forest - 4160 Tuesdays

Imagine…

Going for a walk on a chilly spring day, layered up with cosy scarves over your coat. The sun's glinting through the still-bare branches, but there's a hint of juicy, fresh green in the air. The promise of spring is near. Birds chirrup joyously from a fallen branch. You're wandering past slender birch and sturdy cedar, treading softly on the springy mossy ground under the trees.

You arrive home, peeling off your woolly layers to find that someone has been making your favourite spiced biscuits. Toasty vanilla mingles with caraway, as the oven breathes its buttery goodness into the heart of your house.

Wear this if you want to feel:

Energised, comforted and optimistic

Perfume notes:

Linden blossom

Soft musk

Tree moss absolute, Virginian cedar

Sarah McCartney, the perfumer and owner of 4160 Tuesdays is a good egg. Perhaps the goodest of good eggs. Maybe even a chocolate egg.

Nature notes for the month: March

Glorious golden goblets stand proud and swaying in the chill

March breeze—daffodils gleam in the pale sun.

First brave bees sup greedily from

tiny honey cups of muscari, fumbling and bumbling, rubbing

sleep out of their eyes

Gusty wind threatens squally showers. Spring is

not quite here

yet.

Blissful chocolate reviews: Cadbury Mini Eggs

⭐ Tiny, smooth, matt eggs, softly speckled with cocoa brown

⭐ Warm vanilla tantalises your nose

⭐ Crisply crackling thin sugar shell between your teeth. It breaks. Smooth and creamy milk chocolate oozes, then trickles across your tongue.

A classic.

Random Scottish fact: Celtic New Year

Under the Julian calendar, the new year was celebrated on 25 March in Scotland.

It was mainly a day for business to take place. Contracts would be renewed and rents paid. Pretty dull really.

If your January resolutions have taken a battering in the past couple of months - and that's okay, the world being in a pretty dreadful way right now - maybe you could gently revisit them. See it as a second chance at a new year? Perhaps remembering to hold anything remotely challenging lightly.

On the blog and LinkedIn:

Super jolly and easy to grow, how about sowing some calendula seeds?

For the ultimate in low maintenance gardening, shrubs are your best friends

Fed up with the price of supermarket bagged salad? Me too. Have you tried growing your own?

As always, all products are paid for by me—not sponsored. And all words and photos are by me too. Er, that's Rowan Ambrose, in case you were wondering.