more winter flowers

A month into the blog I had another look around the garden to see what flowers were out.  That could be a regular posting for the first of each month, unless I'm on holiday, or ill.  There's not a lot of progress to report since the first of January.  The snowdrops are showing white, but still not fully out.  I think this is about the point that I worry each year that something has happened to them, and they have dwindled instead of making increase, then in a few more days they're properly out.  There are a few small cyclamen, but they look rather overwhelmed by the cold damp greyness of it all.  The witch hazels are great, glowing with colour and spicily scented, though I don't find they throw their fragrance across the garden so well as the Sarcocca confusa.  I wonder if that was flowering on New Year's day and got unfairly overlooked when I walked round the garden.  It was drizzling.  The buds on Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill' look promising.  She has lost nearly all her leaves whereas she normally doesn't, but I think she'll be OK, given some other D. bholua forms are deciduous.  The buds on Ribes laurifolium are looking good too.  I'll return to the topic of those once they're fully out, as it is a good shrub that deserves its own post.  Viburnum bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' has opened some flowers, though the brown remains of failed earlier attempts slightly marr the overall effect.  Iris unguicularis is still not really performing, another subject to be returned to in a future post.  The Helleborus foetidus under the shrub roses have pulled themselves together in the past month and look much stouter and more cheerful, with greenish yellow flowers.  I hope these will start seeding about, as H. foetidus is wont to do, and start a colony in the gloom.  The catkins on the hazel along the edge of the wood and in the boundary hedge are looking really good.  We should prize our native Corylus avellanus much more if only it came from the Himalayas, and was expensive to buy and fiendishly difficult to grow.  The catkins provide an excellent pollen supply for early flying bees.

Overall the garden is looking rather beaten down and sad, with squashed patches where the snow has lain on evergreens and some of the twiggy deciduous shrubs, and the odd broken branch.  I'll just have to keep working my way round with pruning tools and string.