Happy hellebores

As these have grown this year, so they have got higher with more blooms: the higher ones are much less shy than the early ones and you can see the detail of the flower without lifting them up. The great benefit of hellebores is that the flowers last for a very long time - from before the tulips bloomed, right out past their going over...

Flowering Currant in March

Ribes sanguineum (Flowering Currant or Red-flowering Currant) - doesn't have any berries, but grows pretty vigorously and has really pretty coloured flowers in Spring. These pictures are from mid-March.

And by the end of March:

March Anemonies

These have given a lovely splash of colour in and around the tulips and daffodils and hyacinths. Lovely light green leaves that ants apparently like climbing over! These are second half of March pictures.

Anemone Coronaria Bicolour:

Anemone Coronaria The Bride:

And this is the end of March:

Late February Happenings

It's been colder on some days than January but often mild too.

Here is morning water on Hypericum (Rose of Sharon), Mahonia Japonica, and the first daffodils to show - on the sunny, East-facing side of the garden - all taken in the last week of February:

Crocuses continued to flower, especially in the lovely moments of bright sunshine. But I only have a handful and really you need a carpet of hundreds to impress, as they're very small! Unless, of course, you do clever close-up pictures:

Some primroses and primulas have started showing, ladybirds have been about, a couple of the Dwarf Irises (Katharine Hodgkin) I planted in tubs have flowered, and there's been loads of lovely, curly pale green foliage from the Anemone Coronaria bulbs also in pots:

But the best thing of all is that three or four years after I started the world's smallest pond, which has always attracted a couple of visiting frogs and newts, we have got our very own frogspawn! Woo-hoo!

Crocus and camellia

A couple of frosts but mostly mild and very wet. Camellia flowering well but getting bedraggled from the rain. Crocuses popping out but I don't have a patch of them and they're too small to look impressive.

We have three camellias; one looks very yellowy and not very well; the other two are vibrant and green-leaved, but only this one of the three has any flowers.

Shy hellebore

Mid January and these helleborus orientalis have come out beautifully. But they are really low on the ground and all the beautiful bits are underneath, so you never really notice how they lovely they are unless you kneel down, lean over, and lift them up, as I did to photograph them.

First frost

First frost since last winter has come really late - third week of January; made everything beautiful. We have some perennial wallflowers already in blossom; the small camellia  (Adolphe Audusson) is just getting ready to flower, and the leaves of the evergreen ceolanthus (California Lilac) look fab with frost on.