Succumbing to the urge to grow

I promised myself that I wouldn't plant anything this year, the first year of creating my new garden. This year was going to be one for clearing, assessing, laying out the structure and getting rid of the pernicious weeds.

However, the urge within me to grow is so strong that I've succumbed. I don't know if you suffer from it too - it is that sheer joy of planting something, nurturing it and seeing the glories that can arise from such humble beginnings.

So first of all I allowed myself to plant some bare-rooted rambling roses, justifying it on the basis that the sooner they go in, the sooner they'll begin to do good for nature.

I'm training three roses up a trio of leylandiis which I left in place when most of the others came out this winter. I had them heavily pruned to reduce the risk of windblow, and they're ugly things, but I knew that really vigorous ramblers which will hopefully cover them in just a few years.

I chose ramblers that have single flowers and also have a good chance of bearing hips, so I went for American Pillar, Rosa helenae and one called Cupid, so I should have a mixture of muted red, white and a fleshy pink respectively.

There is so much to do in the garden that anything I do grow this year needs to be quick and easy, so for a thin bed in front of the garage, I'm just going to put some sunflowers and intersperse them with one of the best butterfly plants there is, Verbena bonariensis.

The sunflowers have gone into individual pots filled with peat-free compost - I like to start them off indoors, in large part to keep them away from those pesky snails and slugs while they're seedlings.

The Verbena has gone into seedtrays. It can be a devil to get to germinate, but will then hopefully self-seed once it is out in the garden.

This is one of those fine seeds that I personally like to use the wet-pencil trick to sow. I just dip the end of the pencil in a saucer of water and then pick up one seed at a time so I can sow them evenly across a seedtray.

Look at the state of my hands! There's nothing like getting in a bit of a mess while you're giving nature a home.