April flowers in my garden

Yesterday, Sunday was an absolutely stunning day, the warmest day of the year so far here in London, with 22 degrees in the afternoon. We have waited a very long time for a day like that! I used the opportunity to take pictures for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, although a bright sunny day is not at all a good photography day, I much prefer slightly overcast, as pictures of flowers and plants look so much better in a less harsh light. But the sun we had yesterday was very much welcome, pictures or no pictures, I haven’t really seen proper sunshine for what feels like forever!

My garden is late. Can’t really find a better word for it than late. Later than I have ever seen it, in all the time I have been in this house, and this is my 12th summer. We have had late springs before, and late summers, and late autumns for that matter – and there has been winters where winter never really got going before spring took over again. But this year we had a proper old long winter, and spring has barely started. The last few day’s slight increase in temperature has helped to push along a few things in the garden, it’s not as if nothing has happened the last 3 months – it has, just much slower than normal. So here we are in April, with daffodils still in buds and crocuses still flowering. Not happened in my garden before, I should have roses in buds now! ...no sign of any roses, by the way, the leaves have barely started to come out, despite that I pruned the roses more than 2 months ago. It has just been too cold for the roses to put on any growth.

OK, so here’s proof, this thermometer is in the shade until late afternoon, and before the sun caught it today it showed just over 22 degrees. This picture was taken at 2:05 pm.

The early spring flowers are still going strong, some of the daffodils are still in bud!

Here is my woodland corner, perhaps some of my readers will remember this area from last year when it was an explosion of crocuses, anemones, cyclamens and arisaemas for almost 5 months, as soon as one thing was about to die out, the next thing would emerge. This year it has been a bit different. I seem to have lost a lot of crocuses, all the white crocuses died off before the blue emerged, last year they came up almost at the same time, and then followed by the anemones. This year all the crocuses in this area are long gone, and only this week has the anemones started flowering. There is absolutely no sign of any arisaemas, although there are more than 50 in this area. They must be still sleeping underground :-)

The anemones are not as many as last year either, both crocuses and anemones were supposed to ‘naturalise’, I don’t think mine have understood what that term means!

My pretty ballerinas are finally flowering! This is Trillium cuneatum, a larger clump which seems to have understood what naturalising means :-)

The flower of Trillium cuneatum.

My camellia started flowering properly this week, 2 months later than last year!!

This is my huge Skimmia japonica 'Rubella' , it has never been pruned and has taken on gigantic proportions, a bit difficult to see in this photo, but although it is not very tall it has become very wide. But I like the un-pruned  look of it, I think I will just leave it to it.

The hydrangeas have finally started to produce leaves, normally they are completely covered in leaves by mid April.

My hyacinths have finally started flowering too, just in time for GBBD! This is Hyacinths 'Woodstock' and 'Fondant'.

Hyacinths 'Woodstock'.

Hyacinths 'Fondant'.

I am continuing to do work on my seating area, still more to do, but my old garden bench here at the right in the picture, got a coat of furniture glazing paint, look at it now, it looks brand new! I love that dark colour the wood gets with the glazing paint, I just need to give the chair a coat too so it all looks the same.

To the left of my seating area is a newcomer from last summer, a Forsythia, dwarf  'Mini Gold' , now flowering for the first time. The plan is to let it live permanently in the container.

Forsythia, dwarf  'Mini Gold'

The first tulips have opened, just in time for GBBD, how nice of them! They are Fosteriana tulips, planted in autumn 2011 and flowered last spring for the first time. Fosteriana tulips are supposed to naturalise well, so I did wonder if they would come up again this year or if last year would be it. But it seems most of them have produced flowers again, so perhaps no need to worry – perhaps they understood what naturalisisng actually mean! These two are 'Madame Lefeber' and 'Albert Heijn',  there is also a white 'Purissima', but there is no sign of flowers on that one yet. The blue primroses was an impulse buy, they don’t really like the terracotta tray, it is a bit shallow so I think these will need a permanent home somewhere in the garden soon.

That was a short roundtrip to see some of the things that are flowering in my garden this mid April 2013. I still have my Chaenomeles in flower, and cyclamens and of course lots of hellebores, but I made a whole post about my hellebores last week so I thought I would skip photos of them this time. If you missed the post about the hellebores you can find it here. I also have lots of pansies in flower in my front garden, but you have seen them before as well so I skipped them too. Somehow I hope my garden will catch up at some point, perhaps if we got really hot weather for a few weeks then things could actually catch up and get back on track. You see, normally I would be waiting for my first roses and lilies right now, and the alliums would be in full flower. And lots of other plants would be just about to flower, plants that hasn’t even got out of ground. I do wonder what I will be able to show you in May’s GBBD, will everything be just as late or has my garden caught up? Well, looking at the next 10 days’ weather nothing much is going to happen in terms of a miracle in my garden, it will be somewhere between 8 and 14 degrees Celsius, not at all enough for my garden to play catch-up. But even if that doesn’t happen I will enjoy every ray of sunshine we get, I have waited a long time for some good sunshine and so has my garden. Until next time, take care.

I am linking this post to:

- May Dream’s Garden, have a look at what’s flowering around the world right now.

- Mosaik Monday at Mary’s Little Red House.