Cherry blossom

I planted this miniature cherry tree 'Petite Noir' about twelve years ago; it's naturally a dwarf variety, and was reckoned to be happy in a pot. At the time I was quite into container gardening, so into a very large pot it went - where it sulked furiously. A couple of times I thought I'd lost it altogether, but it always came back to remind me just how much it hated its life.

Last year we had a horrible Leylandii hedge removed along the boundary between our back yard and our neighbour's garden - twelve huge trees that blocked most of the light from the back of her house, and even made me (living on the north side of them) feel oppressed. Behind the trees was the actual boundary - the old stone wall, about five feet high, that divided our plot from the farm that originally occupied most of this end of the village.

It's a fairly picturesque wall, in the sense of being ancient and rather crumbling, but there's a lot of it, and it looked pretty stark. So we got the chap who's being doing gates and fences for us for many years to drive in some huge posts about a foot away from it, and run heavy wires between them; and then CH dug me some planting holes between some of the Leylandii stumps - although excavated would be a better word, because he had to use a mattock to get through all the root and stone.

I put in two grape vines and a Gloire de Dijon rose, all to be trained up the wires; the crab apple tree which I nearly blipped on Friday; and the miserable, pot-bound cherry tree - which as you can see is now full of the joys of spring. It did produce a couple of fruit last summer (for the first time ever) - I was looking forward to tasting them because the flavour is supposed to be excellent, but the birds got them before I could. I'm hoping from this display of blossom that this summer there might be enough cherries to go round!

Shot with the 13mm extension tube on the 50mm lens. Please do view this large.