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

Buds

So here we are again, on the threshold of another gardening year - and surely there is nothing that epitomises the gardener's feelings of hope and expectation more than a flower bud at the point of opening.

It's worth leaning on your garden spade, taking a breather from digging and contemplating the mind-boggling processes that have taken place inside a flower bud in the months, days and weeks that have led up to this moment. Somewhere in the apex of the plant tissues a group of cells has become committed to becoming a flower rather than developing into leaves. They've undergone a precise series of divisions and choreographed cell expansions that has produced an embryonic flower, tightly packaged in a bud that only requires a little warmth and a surge of water coursing through its tissues to expand into its full glory.

It's been weeks in the making - months in the case of bulbous species like bluebell whose flower initials were formed in the bulb last year - and as soon as the flower has done its job and attracted a pollinator it will collapse and die. I can think of nothing in nature where the combination of structure and function have evolved to an extent that is so aesthetically satisfying - or so fleeting; the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the individual life of flower is measured in days.