January Flowers

I used to think the flowers of the spring were colour-coded.  Apart from the early, winter flowers like snowdrops and crocuses, spring began properly in March in a blaze of yellow: primroses, daffodils, celandines and forsythia.  April was white with wild garlic, stitchwort, cow-parsley, and blossom on the apple and hawthorn and wild cherry trees.  Then May brought the blue of forget-me-nots and bluebells, before summer turned this to the bright pink or purple of thistles, orchids, foxgloves, woundworts, willowherbs, and cranesbills.

Of course, these were arbitrary distinctions.  But there used to be some sort of pattern of what order the seasons came in.  Okay, a few years ago I remember seeing daffodils, and birds building nests, before Christmas, but that was in Southampton, which is both an urban heat island and a port town on the south coast.  Rural Somerset must be different, surely?  Somerset gets actual winters, as in ‘You can’t get to the supermarket because the roads are covered in snow, but the supermarket is out of bread anyway because the delivery lorry can’t get through.’

This year, though, spring seems to have started before we’ve had a winter.  Yes, there have been crisp, frosty mornings, and yes, there was a layer of ice on the water-butt for a few days.  About three weeks ago, I walked home from work with a light scattering of snowflakes whirling around me, enough to look charming but without any snow lying to make walking difficult, and without the temperature becoming uncomfortably cold.  But the forecast for the first half of February suggests mild, April-like temperatures, and I find this entirely believable.

Of course, the sky could be planning to drop a few snowdrifts on us in late February and March.  We might get a white Easter, the trees ‘wearing white for Eastertide’ not because they are covered in blossom as in the poem, but because they are hung with literal snow.

In the meantime, however, the flowers have decided that spring is here.  My friend Doom Metal Singer had noticed lungwort flowering by her caravan back in December.  On the first day of 2024, PDB11 and I went for a walk and, before we had even left our own drive, noticed two sets of flowering trees whose names we weren’t sure of (according to some of the plant-identification apps online, they might both be species of viburnum, the deciduous vibernum farreri

and the evergreen viburnum tinus),

and hazel catkins.

Now, nearly a month later, we went out for a walk on the last day of January and spotted an astonishing profusion of flowers.  Apart from snowdrops

and winter jasmine,

winter pansies,

Bergenia crassifolia,

and what I think must have been a hellebore, which are normal winter flowers, 

as well as daisies, which don’t really have an off season, 

and periwinkles (which flower from February to May, so weren’t ridiculously early), 

there were daffodils looking as if it was already March; 

primroses,

lesser celandines,

lungwort

and grape hyacinth (all of which usually flower from March to May),

rosemary (usually flowers March to June),

a cherry tree in blossom (okay, there are different varieties of cherry that flower at different times, but you wouldn’t really expect it earlier than March outside a big city),

summer snowflakes (April to May),

berberis (usually flowers April to June),

what may have been an ox-eye daisy (May to September) or a Shasta daisy (July to September),

and cyclamens (usually flower from June to October, though they can persist over winter). 

I wouldn’t have known what most of these are without finding some handy online apps for identifying flowers from photographs, so I may have got some of them wrong – I would be grateful if readers would tell me about any that are misidentified.

I don’t really know how to feel about this.  On the one hand, flowers are beautiful, whenever they come.  But equally, the flowers appearing this early are a reminder that the planet is warming, and that an early spring will likely be followed by yet another summer that breaks all the records for hottest summer ever.

But having an opinion on flowers doesn’t really achieve much in practice.  I suppose the best thing I can do is to enjoy them while they are there, and to campaign for the world to stop burning fossil fuels or chopping down forests before things get much worse.