Without ‘Gardener’s World’ on TV it may seem that all things horticultural are dormant at this time of year until Monty Don revives them all again in spring. However a walk down the road led me to discover three very different flowering plants. The first was the lesser celandine, despite the fact it was just a single flowering and rather tatty individual the intense yellow stood out from the brown and green hedgerow backdrop. The melt water from the ‘mini ice age’ of last week must have re-invigorated it as with the stinking hellebore I found on the banks of the village stream.
The stinking hellebore is a fairly rare plant but due to its liking for Wenlock Edge’s calcareous soils it thrives on the edge of our rivers, streams and roads. What the plant doesn’t have in looks - even the flowers are green - it makes up for in interesting facts. All parts are poisonous and if consumed will lead to violent vomiting and delirium; it uses yeasts to colonise the plant and raise its overall temperature in order to make it more attractive to pollinators; and when crushed it releases a foul smell leading to its other name Dungwort.
Finally on the path up to the village church the snowdrops that were nervously poking through the snow last week, are now all out. The great survivors of any winter, neither snow nor ice nor flooding can prevent them from flowering year in year out, despite their apparent fragility. And as the afternoon sun shone over the great humpback of the Clee and melted the final slushy ice, I thought: ‘Is that the end of winter?’
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