Well the elderflowers are ready much earlier than usual, so a great excuse to take yourself and the dogs (if you have them) out on a long walk to gather up some of these fragrant blooms.
By all means if you don’t have a dog feel free to borrow any of my three as they are a complete pain at the moment with all the baby bunnies around I seem to be spending a lot of time waiting for them to finish doing bouncing Tigger impressions in the corn, it’s all a bit of a waste of energy as they never seem to catch one!
I know the aroma of the native elder (Sambucus nigra) can be a bit of crowd splitter but you can’t deny it makes a rather lovely floral cordial, we drink gallons of it in our house it’s lovely mixed with soda water or occasionally prosecco!
I ideally wait for a sunny day when blooms are at their most aromatic and just snip the flower heads off into a bag, about 20 heads is enough. Then try to use them as soon as possible after picking to get the best flavour, it only takes 20 minutes from start to finish to make some sugar syrup, pare the lemons, pop in the flowers, add the citric acid and leave for 24 hours to infuse, bottling up the next day. It's easy to make and who doesn’t like some free ingredients?
Now, I don’t know about you but I find the different groups of clematis pruning a little confusing. Keeping things as simple as possible I can tell you it is time to give a prune to your clematis if it has just finished flowering, this is group one which flower early, on shoots produced in the previous season, examples include: Clematis armandii and Clematis montana, there I told you I’d keep it simple.
You are really supposed to trim box hedging on Derby day, but any time around now will be fine. So trim away and get creative with your topiary if you are brave enough!