Bring bright, sunny colour to your late-winter garden with the earliest flowers of the year, which will spread to create golden carpets under trees
WORDS JOHN GRIMSHAW PHOTOGRAPHS CLIVE NICHOLS
Soon after Christmas, I – and if social media is a guide, many other like-minded individuals – can be found out in the garden looking for signs of life from our winter aconites: a crop of postings on first sightings is the result. The appearance of these sunny flowers is a powerful signal that the year has turned and earns them a special place in gardeners’ affections. Unlike snowdrops and other bulbs with shoots that spear out of the ground, winter aconites shoulder their way up, with the flowering stem forming an arch, the top of which breaks the surface first. As it emerges, it straightens out and pulls up the bud at its tip, protected from this treatment by a ring of bracts. Rather like a butterfly spreading its wings, the bracts and bud quickly expand into a green ruff surrounding the yellow flower.
The central European winter aconite, Eranthis hyemalis, is what most people understand as an aconite – a low-growing tuberous plant with deeply lobed, rounded leaves and bracts of vibrant green, surrounding rounded, yellow, buttercup-like flowers. The other plant commonly called aconite, Aconitum, is the summer-flowering monkshood. Early botanists associated Eranthis with those plants through the similarity of its foliage and its toxicity: ‘winter wolfsbane’ was widely used, and by 1633 the English name winter aconite was in use. Although I have never heard of any ill effect from contact with Eranthis by either people (or their domesticated wolves), it is worth noting that the whole plant is toxic to mammals, and no part should ever be ingested.
In its normal form, Eranthis hyemalis has bright-yellow flowers, opening in sunshine to about 3cm across, when their brightness becomes a wonderful antidote to winter drabness. Appearance time depends on the season, but in a normal, not-too-cold winter they are usually in full flower in lowland Britain by late January, continuing well into February, and provide a very welcome source of nectar and pollen for early bees.
There’s a little variation in flowering time between stocks and cultivars: last year
