Beautiful buds

One of the joys of spring is to watch buds develop and then burst - exquisite shapes with all the beauty of the flowers packaged within. 

Daffodil

Aloe variegata

Sambucus racemosa

 Blackcurrant

Horse chestnut

Horse chestnut

Hyacinth

Rhododendron dauricum

Erythronium 'Pagoda'

Marsh marigold Caltha palustris

Ash Fraxinus excelsior flower buds

Sycamore Acer pseudoplatanus

Pasque flower, Pulsatilla vulgaris, Ranunculaceae

Pasque flower usually flowers in our garden around Eastertide, but this year an early Easter and an exceptionally late spring means that the flowers are only just opening. I particularly like the covering of fine silky hairs that trap water droplets on misty mornings.



Pulsatilla vulgaris is a rare and endangered species of calcareous grassland in England, now confined to just a few locations. Many of its old sites have been ploughed up. In the wild the plant often grows in nutrient-poor soils and is usually quite small, with only a couple of flowers, but cultivated varieties grown in better soil conditions are far more floriferous. The secret of long term cultivation seems to be to grow it in very well-drained soils in a sunny spot. 

After the flowers have finished the feathery seed heads stay attached to the plant for several weeks. I've found that the best way to grow the plants from seed is to sow them soon after they're ripe - stored seed has much poorer germination.

It think it's a charming plant, nicely summed up by William Robinson in The English Flower Garden: "There are few sights more pleasant to the lover of spring flowers", he wrote, "than to see its purple blooms just showing through the hard grass on a bleak down on an early spring day".

Cyclamen hederifolium, Primulaceae

I was never a great fan of Cyclamen until I started buying this little beauty, C.hederifolium, as a winter house plant. It ticks all the boxes: attractive foliage; compact and very floriferous form; long-lasting (some that I bought back in December are still in bloom); sweetly scented (at least the white-flowered varieties are - I can't detect much scent in the darker pink and red varieties); and it's cheap - the nursery where I buy them sells them for £1 each. 

One particularly attractive feature of Cyclamen is the shape of the flower buds, that are twisted like the swirl of a dancer's skirt.

The only tricky thing about growing this little beauty is remembering not to over-water it. The densely packed leaves and flowers succumb to Botrytis at the stem bases if you do.

Viburnum x bodnantense 'Dawn', Adoxaceae

The darkest days of winter in our garden have been brightened by the scented flowers of Viburnum bodnantense 'Dawn', which has been in bloom continuously since late November. The first flowers tend to be damaged by the worst of the winter weather but the recent ones, now it's a little milder, have a more intense colour. The twigs make good cut flowers for a small vase because the flowers are borne on their tips and open to perfection indoors.

V. x bodnantense is a hybrid between V. farreri and V. grandiflorum, raised at Bodnant in North Wales in 1935.

It used to be thought that Viburnum belonged to the honeysuckle family, Caprifoliaceae, but recent molecular studies using DNA sequencing have shown it to be a member of the family Adoxaceae. Forty years ago, when I was a trainee botanist, the Adoxaceae was believed to contain just a single species, town-hall clock Adoxa moschatellina but, as is so often the case, molecular biology has revealed unsuspected phylogenetic relationships. 

White Magic

Some snow adds a touch of magic to a botanic garden in winter. These pictures were taken today in Durham University Botanic Garden

Rhododendron dauricum and ..................

....Mahonia x media 'Charity'

Kniphofia spp., Red-hot Poker, Xanthorrhoeaceae, sub-family Asphodeloidea

It came as a surprise to me that red-hot pokers thrive in my garden here in North East England. If you look at the distribution map of the species, through Africa and Madagascar, with an outlier in Yemen, you'd imagine that heat and dry conditions are a requirement but when you look at the habitats occupied by many of the species - cooler, higher altitude sites - maybe it's not so surprising that they do well in my flower borders. This summer, which was cool and wet, seems to have suited them pretty well......

.... especially this yellow-green flowered variety. I've lost its label but I think it might be 'Percy's Pride'. This plant produced 15 flower spikes and was in bloom for six weeks.

The best display of Kniphofia uvaria that I've ever see in Britain is this one, in the sand dunes on the Northumberland coast at Low Newton-by-the-sea where it is verging on becoming invasive  They're not the conditions that would be easy to replicate in most gardens though.

I'm always interested in the native insects that visit exotic flowers in British gardens. In its native habitats Kniphofia is pollinated by sunbirds and each individual flower produces a large volume of nectar to attract these energetic pollinators. The nectar must trickle down those long, downward-pointing tubular flowers, because peacock butterflies seem to have no trouble in reaching it.

Access is more of a struggle for wasps, which will do almost anything to reach sweet nectar in autumn when they are no longer feeding their brood. This enterprising individual discovered that the easiest way to reach a reward was to chew a hole through the corolla ...... 

...... while this one chose to do it the hard way, forcing its way into a flower that really evolved to accommodate a sunbird's long, slender, curved beak.

Masterwort, Astrantia maxima and A. major., Umbelliferae

Ever since masterwort Astrantia major was introduced into British gardens in 1597, from its native central and eastern Europe, garden writers have been somewhat dismissive of the plant. William Robinson, in The English Flower Garden in 1883 was wary of its invasive tendencies (".... apt to over-run and exhaust the soil") and suggested that "if grown at all it should be in rough or wild places, or in the back part of the shrubbery". 

However, the species in the picture above, Astrantia maxima, is rather more delicate and trickier to cultivate, so is unlikely to be invasive. It needs better, more moisture-retentive soil than A. major.

It's easy to see why the more commonly cultivated A. major  was sometimes known as 'hattie's pincushion" and why Graham Stuart Thomas, in his Perennial Garden Plants (1976) described the flowers as having "...an interesting and beautiful shape". . 

It isn't obvious that this is a member of the Umbelliferae but if you shrink that ring of papery bracts and elongate the pedicels that support the individual florets the result is a more obvious umbel.

The plant has a long flowering period, seems to do well in sun, shade and dry soil in my garden, makes an attractive long-stemmed addition to a bunch of cut flowers and, best of all, is an excellent source of pollen and nectar for .....

... hoverflies ....

                 ..... and bees, that merely need to walk over the inflorescence to collect their reward with minimum effort.