five flowers yellow

There are still plenty of yellow flowers, as spring reaches its full flush.  In the dry soil at the top of the garden are two sorts of yellow flowered shrubby members of the pea family.  The first is Coronilla emerus, or Scorpion Senna, a graceful thing with smallish, compound mid-green leaves like a vetch.  The flowers are likewise quite small, carried in numerous clusters, and each has a warm brown stripe on the back of the top petal, which I have just learned from Wikipedia is called the banner in peas.  The shrub can reach up to a couple of metres, given time, and mine is being loomed over by a bird-sown Portuguese laurel which I allowed to stay, as it provided useful shelter. The catalogues say that the Coronilla requires shelter from cold winds, and it seems quite happy cuddling up to the laurel.  It is supposed to need free drainage, and the laurel experience proves that it can cope with root competition once established.

The second shrubby pea is Caragana arborescens 'Lorbergii'.  Its flowers are more slender and elongated than those of the Coronilla, which have the chubby, cheerful look of a lupin.  The edges of the Caragana petals are slightly rolled in, adding to the narrow, pointed look of the flowers, and the leaves are slender too, reduced to narrow strips.  It is the filament-like leaves that distinguish 'Lorbergii' from the usual species.  The common name of Caragana arborescens is Siberian Pea Tree, and according to the Bluebell Nursery website it is hardy in Finland almost to the Arctic Circle. It can make a small tree, and is tolerant of very poor soil and cold winds, which is why I chose it for the particular spot it occupies in our garden, though it's taking its time reaching tree size.

In the gravel the Asphodeline lutea is just starting to open.  This throws up flowering spikes from clusters of evergreen, greyish, strap shaped leaves.  The unopened buds initially cluster together in knobs at the tops of the spikes, each yellow bud showing green stripes, which remain up the centre of each petal as they open.  The open flower is wide and starry, with six petals, and the spike continues to elongate so that they end up quite nicely spaced out along the stem.  They start opening from the bottom of the cluster, but it is slightly haphazard.  Afterwards come fat, round seed pods in shiny green, which turn black as they ripen, and then lots more Asphodeline, if you don't dead-head.  I have seen them described as needing fertile soil, and maybe they would like that better, but they grow happily in the gravel, which of course is never mulched with extra organic material.

I have made a note to myself to get more Narcissus 'Sun Disc', because they have survived so well, and the flowers lasted so long, in a very dry and sandy corner close to a conifer.  This is a dwarf daffodil with neat, flat flowers, the inner layer of petals a small circle of bright yellow, the outer petals primrose.  Because it is difficult to label individual clumps of bulbs, without making the garden look like a hamster's graveyard (and anyway the birds would scratch them up) it can be difficult to keep track of which varieties are which, but having kept a note of what I planted along the edge of that particular bed, I have managed to match up the flowers in the garden to the catalogue description.

Down along the front of the bog bed is Geum rivale 'Lemon Drops'.  I grew them from seed, so don't know if they are strictly entitled to the name, when the internet tells me that the original 'Lemon Drops' was found as a seedling in the Chatto Gardens.  Keep a keen eye on pots of Geum if you are growing them in a greenhouse: vine weevils love them.  Slightly ruffled lemon yellow petals stand almost upright around a wide central boss of ginger anthers, so that the flower shape is more bowl than bell.  The calyx is softly hairy and flushed red at the base.  I haven't spotted any more self sown seedlings yet, but perhaps I have been too keen weeding, or overly generous with the Strulch, or maybe other plants shade them out at the time when they would be germinating.