End of Month View – January

Where did January go?? It is usually a month that feels very long, but the last few weeks have flown away for me. It has been rather cold here in London, much, much colder than last January, but it was unusually mild last year and statistically we won’t have it like that every year – sadly! This January the temperatures have been between 2-8 degrees C, with a biting cold wind for most of the time. So far I have not seen a single snow flurry and including last month I have had only 4 nights where it dipped below freezing, but just barely below - at the bottom of my garden. I have an indoor weather station that measures the temperatures 2 places in my garden and up at the backdoor where my nursery shelves are there still hasn’t been any frost at all according to my thermometers. The minimum temp recorded there so far this winter was 0.5 C, last week.

Last year’s daylilies

Last year I kept promising I would make a separate post about my daylilies once they all had finished flowering. The first one started to flower in June and I took photos of them all when they were in flower, and waited for them all to finish, but there were several that just kept throwing out flower after flower - and the last daylily flowered in mid-November! I therefore decided to wait until now to give you the whole presentation – after all, what could be more uplifting on a cold January day than a whole bunch of cheerful daylilies?!

January flowers - GBBD

It’s mid-January, the Christmas decoration is back in its boxes, the crocuses and snowdrops are flowering and it is 6 weeks and 3 days till we officially have spring here in London. Yay! As usual, in my garden we start a bit earlier with things, the first hellebores and snowdrops have been flowering since before Christmas and the first crocus started flowering last week. I have daffodils in bud and Iris reticularis well above ground. And my two camellias are continuing to give me the occasional flower. Yes, everything is normal in my January garden. The temperature has been more ‘normal’ so far this winter compared to last year, but last winter was unusually mild. Despite that, so far I have only had two nights just about below freezing and this week’s ‘very cold’ weather here in UK is probably not going to bring my garden below freezing – although it will be close.