winter flowers

I wandered around the garden this morning, to see what was new.  In the past couple of days the winter iris, Iris unguicularis, have come into flower.  The plants are honestly rather tatty, with a tangle of old brown leaves at the back of the bed, and new leaves emerging in front of them, and I realise I should have been along the row and tidied them up before they started blooming, but I didn't.  The flowers aren't looking all that great either, quite a few having already collapsed from rain or old age, while something has been eating holes in some of the petals.

I have picked one to describe to you.  It has three upstanding petals, in a colour that is more violet than blue, veined with purple.  They have slightly ruffled edges, and if given one to identify in total isolation without the benefit of the rest of the flower, I might have guessed it came from a clematis.  Inside them are three small, narrow, light purple strips of petal-like texture, ends forked liked snakes' tongues and fused at the base, whose botanical role I don't honestly know, though I presume they are some part of the reproductive arrangements.  The tips of the three outer petals droop over in typical iris fashion, and their bases are white, with a central yellow stripe and broken mauve veining.  The flower has a faint but delicate scent, akin to hyacinths, but not nearly so free on the air.  To smell it at all I have to stick my nose right in and sniff.

Some of the orange flowered Hamamelis are out, but not the yellow ones.  I didn't put my face to those, but from the vantage point of the edge of the lawn I couldn't smell any scent at all.  It was cold and quite windy when I walked around, not the best circumstances for enjoying winter fragrance.

The buds of the oriental hellebores are showing colour, and on some plants the flower stems have elongated.  So far they don't seem to have been hit by rodents or muntjac to anything like the same extent as last year.  The buds of Pulmonaria rubra, which is always the first of the pulmonarias to open, are showing a glint of soft red.  They were grazed off last year as well.  There are a few primroses out, and one cowslip.  The hazel catkins are looking very fine, though in places I slightly wish they wouldn't, because I need to cut the hedge, and don't like cutting a fine crop of catkins off when they are such a good winter pollen source for insects.

And that's about it.  There are fat leaf and flower buds aplenty, but not much is actually out yet. The young winter flowering cherry, planted at the top of the garden where the drainage is sharp to replace the one towards the bottom of the garden which ended up sitting half in a swamp when the water table moved, has not flowered at all yet this winter, so far as I've noticed.  The scent of the iris is growing stronger, however, now that it's been in the warmth of the kitchen for half an hour.