Twelve months of flowers

My garden through 2024

Hello everyone, and I’d like to wish you all the HAPPIEST of Christmases this year. Thank you so much for subscribing to my garden musings here on Substack and I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey through my garden year. I’m giving you a summary of my garden in 2024 in photos today to show that it really is possible to have something in flower all year round. With the publication of my book Pastoral Gardens recently, I have been talking a lot about how important it is to have flowers for pollinating insects in your garden all year round - even in January or February on a day warmed by winter sun, the odd bee can wake from its slumber to come out foraging. So when you’re planning your planting schemes, make sure you are thinking about each of the four seasons and not just spring or summer when the majority of plants are flowering. You can read my suggestions for planning a seasonal planting list in a previous post.

Let me take you through the highlights of my garden month by month, with a few thoughts and ideas. If the post is too long for the email (sometimes it cuts off mid flow) you can read the whole post in the Substack App.

January

January is a time of minimal colour and seed heads, with the odd jewel of a flower shining through. Without the magic wand of a frosty day, my collapsing garden can look dismal, but the emerging snowdrops and hellebores, and the fat, furry buds of the Magnolia stellata remind me that new life is out there and I know that the garden will soon be transformed.

I have a bed of hellebores that gets neglected as it’s on the other side of the driveway, but when they start to bloom I can see them from the kitchen window and I’ll go and move the bins to make sure they are in full view. I have a mixture of hybrids and their offspring in veined pinks, spotty mauves and double whites, and enjoy picking their blooms to float in a bowl of water on the kitchen island. I say they are neglected - they seem to thrive on neglect as the only attention they get is to have their old leaves chopped back once the new growth starts coming through. They might get mulched in spring if they are lucky, but they seem to thrive here against a north-facing fence, doing better than their counterparts in a sunny border.

February

The snowdrops are in full flow in February and I’m adding to them year by year. I’m lucky enough to live minutes away from Edulis Nursery where Paul Barney is building up an impressive collection of snowdrops, and I am usually lured there at some point to see them all in flower and to buy yet another gorgeous new variety. (You can read my post about Paul’s snowdrops here). A friend and I have started to do snowdrop swaps (and auriculas too) which is a good way to increase your collections without going bankrupt. Snowdrops can be very, very expensive…