These small but priceless plants bring a welcome sparkle to the coldest season
It may still feel like winter, but the days are already getting longer and brighter and the garden is beginning to stir. The first flowers of the new year are nudging their way through the ground and that’s an exciting prospect. Once those early flowers open, they’ll be visited by buff-tailed queen bumblebees in search of nectar. These large-bodied, short-tongued queen bumblebees often emerge from hibernation on warm January afternoons. They’re desperate for a source of nectar, so they rely on plants that flower on the cusp of winter and spring, for their very survival.
February flowers also lift our spirits too and you really don’t have to have a huge garden. They can be accommodated in small pots or larger containers, within a patch of grass, close to awarm wall, around a tree, or under a shrub. Whatever you decide, most of them need awarm, bright spot that benefits from afternoon sunshine. This helps promote earlier flowers and encourages nectar to flow.
These jewels, which tend to hug the ground, bridge the gap between winter and spring, a glorious event that’s still a few weeks away.
Go natural
Lots of bulbs naturalise and multiply when planted in the correct places, so you’ll get drifts of colour that look very natural. Many of our earlier flowering bulbous plants are species with two Latin names. They include Eranthis hyemalis (winter aconite), Scilla siberica, Cyclamen coum, Narcissus cyclamineus and Crocus chrysanthus. Almost all spread by self-seeding, following a visit from a pollinator. If you deadhead these miniature bulbs, corms and tubers, most will fail to multiply. Iknow this sounds counter intuitive, because gardeners are always told to deadhead their bulbs. However, later-flowering bulbs are hybrids and they have enough vigour to produce offsets underground. Their seedlings will not come true to type.
Under trees
One of the loveliest harbingers of spring is the winter aconite. However, they need careful placing, because their globular yellow flowers are programmed to stay tightly shut unless temperatures reach 10C or more. On dull days, when pollinators are unli
