February Blooms for GBBD

When I announced that the GBBD post (an idea of Carol of May Dreams Gardens) of last January would be my last one, it seemed to disappoint so many garden bloggers, that I've decided to do a few more. Yes, I'm a great big softy but you knew that, right? But I won't do another whole year, as the GBBD posts from May til October take me about 4 hours to make. And 4 hours per post is a bit much, don't you think?
It takes me that long because I have so many blooms during those months that all have to be photographed, their names written down on long lists, then I have to look up their common name in English as I'm Dutch and therefore I am more familiar with the common names for plants in Dutch, not English. Because I've watched the British gardening programme Gardener's World, I am familiar with quite a few common plant names in English, but that is British English, not American or Canadian or Australian English. During last year I've found that the common names for plants are not always the same in America, Britain, Canadia or even Australia and that means that my best bet to avoid confusion about which plant it is, is to write down all the botanical names of the plants. I know quite a few of those as I've been gardening for quite a few years, but not all and as I like to spell them right too, that means more looking up which is time consuming.
Then I have to get the pics from my camera onto my pc, make them smaller (another rather time consuming process), load them up on Blogger (takes quite some time too), write the text and then ................ TADAAAA, suddenly 4 hours later, my post for GBBD is done. So I hope you will understand why I won't do those posts anymore this year.
Since last Tuesday I've been having a lot of pain both in my neck and right shoulder which makes blogging and commenting a bit painful so I've decided to go easy on myself this time and make it a short bloom post, well, short-ish. ;-) So I will only show you what is in bloom outside.

So far you've seen:
- 3 Hellebores in flower
- Winter Aconites
But I have also in flower:
purple Crocuses and
yellow ones and
white ones.
There is also
lungwort in flower,
and Skimmia,
Grape Hyacinths,
Bergenia,
Violets in blue,
yellow,
burgundy and white.

Adding a lovely scent to the winter garden is
Sarcococca or christmas box. The plant itself is nothing to write home about but it's scent is great! The pic is not as good as I had hoped, sometimes my camera's autofocus is not really doing its job properly.

Something about which I'm very happy, is that my daffodils are out already. I took this pic last week, now more flowers have opened.
I'm nuts about dafs, no other flower says Spring to me more than the daffodils do. Such cheerful flowers too!

Still in flower is the
hanging rosemary,
the winter Jasmine,
Periwinkle or vinca minor and
my Camellia. In this pic its in my conservatory as we had some nights with - 5 C frost and I didn't want to get frost damaged flowers.

As I like wildflowers I include them in this GBBD post too and here they are, my darling
daisies!

My pride and joy at the moment, apart from the first daffodils, are the snowdrops. Here's a pic of the special greenpoints,
still a small clump as you can see, but it is only its first year of flowering and I have high hopes that someday it will look something like this;
a clump of ordinary snowdrops, but aren't they simply gorgeous?

My garden has truly woken up and it is not only showing a lot of blooms already, but it is also full of promise of things to come.
Amelanchier forming buds.

The weekend is going to be sunny but cold over here, the Spring weather left us last Wednesday. But as long as the sun is shining I'm not complaining. It's good to see that the days are lengthening and nature is waking up.

Have a great weekend!

copyright 2008: Y.E.W. Heuzen

It is February.
The bulbs are shooting,
the moon is slipping
dripping stars, hot and sticky.
Jane Eaton Hamilton