A new year starts here and along with it a new garden journal in a new book. This year I will restructure the format of my journal so that it includes fewer photos and written reports but more paintings. For my title page I wrote, “A year in the life of our garden in drawings, paintings, photos and maybe a few words.”
Each month I will include paintings and sketches, a flowering plant of the month, a foliage plant of the month and a ‘bark and stem’ plant of the month. So enjoy the January pages of my 2020 garden journal.
The first page of my January entries featured two watercolour paintings of our Witch Hazels, Hamamelis ‘Jelena’ and H ‘Diane’.
Page two sees me looking at the amazing winter flowering shrub, Cornus mas. Each month I will feature a “Flowering plant of the month” and this Cornus is my January choice.
“Scented flowers. Deep red berries. Deeply textured bark.”
I then created two more watercolours of flowering winter plants, one shrub and one climber, Daphne bhuloa ‘Jacqueline Postill’ and Jasminum nudiflorum.
I moved onto look at my ‘Foliage plant of the month” and my choice for January is our little collection of Arum italicum.
My final plant of the month is Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’, January’s plant of the month for stems and bark, with its “Orange stems, orange ‘snake-bark’ trunks, small white flowers and primrose-yellow autumn colour.”
My January entries in my garden journal end with our “Garden tasks for the month”, so it was “Heads down to lay seep hose through borders, prune large branches of Mahonia and pruning Hypericums.”
So that is our January in our garden. We will visit my garden journal in February to see what went on in that month.
greenbenchramblings 
2 replies on “My Garden Journal 2020 – January”
Our white veined arum italicum look wonderful with snowdrops this week. So I thinl I shall divide our one clump and put it with some other snowdrops. Is it just the mild weather or has this been a particularly lovely one for plants?
I love arums but there seem so few different ones around – the plant breeders don’t like them perhaps. We have one called Chameleon which is beautiful but A. italicum still is a delight!
January has been great for plants – bit too much rain for gardeners though perhaps.
Malc