The snowdrops are coming up all over the garden, they really seem to love it here and bulk up massively from season to season, its amazing. A quick look around the winter garden shows that there are quite a few plants in flower.
My huge Mahonia bush is covered in racemes of bright yellow flowers that smell delicious. There are several types of viburnum in flower too as well as some hellebores.
I love to see the first shoots and flowers of winter and early spring, especially when the weather is so murky and dismal and yet these plants never fail to put on a show.
The snowdrops especially are a delight.
They are so delicate and elegant early in the season when there is little else around.
Last winter I was amazed to see how popular they were with my bees. I’d read that snowdrops were good for honeybees when they first emerged in February but I’d never seen bees visiting the flowers: Probably because we didn’t have a strong population of honeybees here at that time.
It’s a great area for snowdrops and there are loads in the woods and in neighbouring gardens, most of them have been there for decades and have never ever been treated with chemicals or even fertilisers and yet still put on a fabulous display.
Their purity is vital for my little bees, for even a sniff of modern pesticides could be enough to cause damage to the baby bees and the future of the hive.
A depressing thought.
I’ve dug some overgrown snowdrop clumps out of the garden and they are on the greenhouse bench to be divided into smaller clumps, some for replanting and some to pot up for my friends.
It’s my next greenhouse job and now I’ve got the key back, as long as I wrap up warm, I can put the greenhouse lights on and pot them up at night.
It’s not just the daylight hours that are getting longer; the greenhouse working time is drawing out too at last.
It wont be long before the days are obviously longer and spring will be knocking on the door.
