March flowers – or should’ve been

It’s Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day again, can’t believe it is a whole month since last time! On last month’s GBBD I wrote: “It has been very cold the last month here in London, and in the whole of Britain, and although we haven’t had much snow here in London, it has actually snowed 3 times – which is 3 times more than many other winters I have been here. The last snowfall was only a few days ago but fortunately the snow didn’t lie for very long. But the cold weather has slowed everything down and the emerging bulbs and plants have been painfully slow, seemingly doing nothing from week to week.”

I am copying in what I wrote last month because it fits exactly for this month too, can you believe it?! We had last snowfall only a couple of days ago, and although it didn’t stay on the ground here in London for very long, it brought the rest of the country to a standstill through rush-hour traffic and the usual main roads and airports were closed or had severe delays.

Here is my garden today, on a distance pretty two-tone in brown and green but if you go a bit closer you might see a colourful dot here and there. But last year I had so many plants in flowers that are weeks away from flowering this year. I had tulips, hyacinths, anemones, and my lovely  Rhododendron Christmas Cheer, all three Skimmias, I had lots more cyclamens in flower, the trillium flowers were open and my big camellia was in full flower. Here is what my garden looked like in March last year, on the exact same date. My garden was neither particularly early nor late last year, it had been a pretty average spring up until then – it was only from April and onwards last year everything went really downhill! This year I recon my garden is 3-4 weeks late, which is quite a lot!

It is at the bottom of my garden most things are happening at the moment. Here is my woodland corner, the white crocuses are almost finished, but if you compare it with last year this corner looks very empty because the anemones have hardly emerged yet, and none has started flowering. I have also lost a lot of crocuses, I am inclined to blame the squirrels and assume they have dug them up and eaten them, but I don’t know of course, I haven’t manage to catch any of them in the act yet - although I see the squirrels digging down there in that corner quite often so I think I can safely blame them!

Crocus Tomasinianus 'Ruby Giant'

Crocus Biflorus 'Miss Vain'

Crocus 'Golden Yellow'

Narcissi 'Golden Ducat'

The clump of trilliums has grown since last year, they haven’t really opened up their flowers yet, but don’t they look sweet already?

Trillium cuneatum

My Sarcococca hookeriana var. digyna is still flowering, thanks to the cold weather.

The Chaenomeles x superba 'Crimson and Gold'  has already flowered once this year, but now it is doing its main flowering, the first one is always a bit more sparse.

Chaenomeles x superba 'Crimson and Gold'  is such a beauty in the garden when bright flowers are few and far between.

Last year the first camellia flower opened on 19th February, pretty normal time, this year I haven’t got one single flower open yet, these are the closest I got and I don’t count these as ‘open’, but with another week maybe they will – which will mean a whole month later than last year!

My primula vulgaris are still going strong, not faced by neither ice cold winds nor the occasional snow fall!

And this will probably be the first tulip to flower, sometime next century – OK, next month more likely, but last year it was in full flower in mid March.

And here is my lovely new hellebore, Helleborus hybridus 'Double White Spotted'

And this is one of my oldest Helleborus hybridus.

Compared to a normal year I should have had lots of colourful flowers in my garden right now. They are on their way, but it’s going painfully slowly in this cold weather. There are lots of websites that predicts the weather long-term, some with more accuracy than other, I have been using one for a long time and they are pretty good in getting it right for south-east of England. According to them we are in for cold weather with single figured temperatures until the end of March, and April will be colder and wetter than average but May could be slightly warmer and drier than average. So there you have it, not a very promising start to the spring – but they might be wrong of course. If you want to see how spring is getting on in people’s gardens around the world you can go to Carol’s blog at May Dreams Gardens where you will find lots of other gardens to visit. Until next time, take care.