Plants for late winter
I’m so desperate to see signs of life and growth just now – a normal response to this depressing time of year but one I’m feeling especially strongly during this lockdown. We’ve got nowhere to go, nothing to do and just a building site to look at, and we’ve got home school to get through 5 days a week. Harrumph.
Anyway, it’s just made me hyper-aware of what I could be looking at, and what I want to be looking at this time next year. Just to have a fully landscaped garden with buxus balls and yew hedges for greenery will make a huge difference. But there are a few key flowering plants that step into the spotlight in January and February, and I want to make sure they’re all represented in the garden – whether in the beds, in pots, or in the greenhouse.
Number one is the hellebore. It’s fair to say I came to hellebores late in life. I don’t remember ever seeing one in my childhood. Were they were not fashionable? Or not suited to Highland winters? Or just too sophisticated to have made an impact on me? Anyway there’s no end of choice in them now and it just amazes me that they come out when they do. They look so… summery, especially the coloured varieties like ‘Harvington Double Apricot’ and ‘Verboom Sifra’. I bought a cut bunch from the florists last year and they lasted weeks inside, so that’s another bonus. So yes, loads of pots of them please.
Ask someone to name a winter-flowering plant and odds-on they’ll say snowdrops. It’s the first bulb to flower in the wild I think… unless winter aconites are a bulb? Must check that. But anyway the first snowdrops are a very cheering sight – an indisputable harbinger of spring – and it’s always even more thrilling to find ones that are a bit different. Every year I look at all the unusual varieties in Gardens Illustrated and think about becoming a galanthophile. I feel like I could really commit, you know? I’ve even bought a sort of plant theatre – well, a hanging thing that takes 7 little terracotta pots – for species snowdrops. Or miniature daffodils. Or auricula. Hmmm. I haven’t quite decided where my specialism will land.
Two others worth special mention here are the little winter-flowering irises – Iris reticulata and Iris unguicularis, for example – and good old heather. Heather plants look pretty lame on their own I think, but in bulk, and in different colours, you can’t help but be impressed. An actual carpet of colour at an otherwise pretty soil-coloured time of year. And iris – well, they just look so exotic, don’t they? Totally out of place in the garden in Britain January. I can’t wait to have pots of these, topped with gravel, grouped together and shining purple in the half-dark of a winter afternoon.