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Sweetly scented Viburnum bodnantense flowers
‘… prune immediately after
flowering or you’ll commit
the same sin as the other
gardener in this household,
of chopping off the
burgeoning buds and losing
a whole year’s flower-power.
He only did it once’
flowers aren’t big – but they pack a
powerful punch on the fragrance front.
Then there’s the slightly later flowering
but no less scented Lonicera x purpusii,
another shrubby honeysuckle with creamy,
perfume-laden flowers in late winter and
early spring. It’s more dense and compact
than L fragrantissima and semi-evergreen,
the flowers normally appearing on bare
wood. Both honeysuckles prefer a
sheltered sunny position.
Looking from my kitchen window
into the garden, I have a view framed by
the winter flowering Clematis cirrhosa var
balearica, one of the earliest (or latest,
depending how you view the gardening
year) clematis to flower. Ignore the name,
which sounds like a nasty liver disease;
‘cirrhosa’ simply means ‘spotted’ and it
refers to the tiny reddish-purple spots
inside the delicate creamy-green bells
which start to open in November and
hang, in loose clusters, right through until
March. Be careful to prune immediately
after flowering or you’ll commit the same
sin as the other gardener in this
household, of chopping off the
burgeoning buds and losing a whole year’s
flower-power. He only did it once.
You’ll all have winter treasures to add
to this list, like writer and poet Vita
Sackville-West, who, with her husband
Harold Nicolson, made the garden at
Sissinghurst. In her poem The Garden, she
gloats over her tiny hoard of winter
flowers:
How about a wild flower meadow like this one at East Ruston Old Vicarage in Norfolk?
Hardy cyclamen brighten
a dark corner
gardening v
One coloured primrose growing from a clump,
One Lenten rose, one golden aconite,
Dog Toby in his ruff, with varnish bright,
One sprig of daphne, roseate or white,
One violet beneath a mossy stump,
One gold and purple iris, brave but small
Child of the Caucasus, and bind them all
Into a tussie-mussie packed and tight
And envy not the orchid’s rich delight.
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