Our gardening expert enjoys the wonder of beautiful blue and yellow spring blooms
WORDS: SUSIE WHITE; WWW.SUSIE-WHITE.CO.UK,
By mid-April my garden is really starting to fill out and there’s freshness and flowers everywhere.
Many of these early spring colours are blue and yellow, and a stunning combination. There’s sharp lemon yellow from the different euphorbias, especially Euphorbia polychroma. Known as the cushion spurge for its low growing rounded shape, this is one of the brightest spring plants I know. Planted alongside royal blue grape hyacinths makes for an amazing colour scheme.
Yellow also mixes happily with blue in my woodland edge plants. Erythronium ‘Pagoda’ has sulphur yellow nodding flowers and rises out of a sea of sky blue forget-me-nots. The golden cups of marsh marigolds contrast with starry blue-flowered brunnera or cup-shaped blue anemones.
My spring favourites – primroses and cowslips – are allowed to self-seed.
Bluebells are flowering in the woods, covering the ground under deciduous trees. The true native bluebell is a lovely violet blue and only flowers on one side of the stem. Its tips bend gracefully and it has a magical scent.
Spanish bluebells have no scent, and paler flowers that stand upright and bear flowers around the stem. The Victorians introduced them and they escaped into the wild where they threaten our native bluebells. They seed prolifically and can become troublesome in a border.
I accidentally acquired Spanish bluebells with a plant that I put into my garden. I use them as cut flowers and any that are left from picking I cut out before they can seed to prevent them spreading or hybridising with the wild bluebells in the woods.
A very pretty blue clematis blooms in April. Clematis alpina has dainty bell-shaped flowers and can be grown against a trellis or allowed to clamber through a rose bush. It flowers profusely and in late summer is covered in silky seedheads which birds and mice use to line their nests.
The cottage garden favourite Clematis montana is also flowering now, scrambling over our shed where I tied it with wires to the roof. It’s a very useful climber for quickly covering a fence and the white flowered variety called wilsonii has a lovely scent of va
