Your GARDENING FORTNIGHT
Val looks forward to the gardening year ahead and explains the important role of bees and hoverflies
The garden jobs are slacking off,thank goodness, and we’re fast approaching the shortest day which is on December 22 this year. I always turn pagan for the day and light a candle, just one, when the light begins to fade into darkness. I will dwell on the gardening year that’s gone, because my new gardening year starts straight after the solstice. The next day is lighter for longer even if it is by a minuscule amount. The other landmark date is January 19th: that’s the day the Northern hemisphere begins to warm up again.
Nature still stirs
There are always things to admire in the garden, something to lift the spirits even on a dankest day. It might be the shimmer of trembling grasses, or lichens clinging on to branches, or droplets of water caught on a spider’s web. Thankfully the first winter flowers are already out at Spring Cottage. My ‘Mrs Macnamara’ snowdrops are flowering round the apricot tree and one or two honeybees have been brave enough to visit them. This snowdrop was named after Dylan Thomas’s mother-in-law, who was born Yvonne Majolier. She wasn’t very jolly to Dylan Thomas, by all accounts.
She ordered her maid to burn his notebooks!
Val’s top five drops
‘Mrs Macnamara’ snowdrops are among my favourites. The drop is lovely with thick-petalled single flowers held on strong stems above wellbehaved glaucous foliage. I would also include ‘Godfrey Owen’, ‘Augustus’, ‘Green Tear’ and ‘Trumps’ in my top five.
Irish snowdrops beloved by small bees
The ‘Mrs Macnamara’ snowdrop almost certainly came from Ireland because Yvonne Macnamara, as she became after marriage, was descended from Anglo-Irish landowners in County Clare. There are lots of fine Irish snowdrops you could grow, including ‘Kildare’, ‘Irish Green’ and ‘Green Lantern’. They obviously love the damp weather the soft, Irish climate provides, but I think there’s another reason as well. For when I visited Ireland in snowdrop time, I noticed hordes of tiny little bees on the snowdrop flowers. They were busy drinking nectar and collecting pollen and, as they went about their task, they were transferring pollen from one flower to another. Seed pods would follow on and produce hybrid seedlings. These are larger in stature, compared to the common snowdrop, and more vigorous too.
I do see similar small bees at Spring Cottage, although never as many or as early in the year. They definitely visit the daisies on my lawn in April and that’s a good reason to leave some growing. The early bulbs at Spring Cottage have to rely on early-flying queen bumblebees instead. If I’m lucky, I’ll get an
