Another new year! Lets hope it will be a healthy and happy one. The garden is waking up very early due to the very mild weather and on New Year’s Day there was a lot in flower around the garden. A lot of the double primroses were trying hard but looking bedraggled after all the rain. Galanthus ‘Faringdon Double’ had already gone over having been out for most of December. I started with one bulb of the snowdrop about four years ago (from the Nerine and Amaryllid Society bulb exchange) and there were at least eleven flowers in the clump this year.

Galanthus ‘Mrs MacNamara’ was in flower on New Year’s Day. This is an early flowering variety that was named after Dylan Thomas’ mother-in-law. There are a lot more snowdrops showing through the ground already. G. ‘Margaret Owen’ has increased very well and may be the next in flower. She is planted in the same flower bed as the snowdrop named after her husband, ‘Godfrey Owen’ – an exceptionally lovely flower.

I have been planting early flowering varieties of daffodils in the past couple of years and they are showing through too. I have buds on Narcissus ‘Rijnveld’s Early’. I planted them in the Autumn but I was late getting them in. I shall have to wait another year before they settle into really early flowering.

The quiet week between Christmas and New Year is a good time to pause and think about what needs to be done in the garden. I am removing things that I planted 15 years ago and just aren’t pulling their weight and changing things to try and make less work for myself! This is an extremely wet garden so thinking about where things are planted is important. Not just whether it will be too wet for them to grow in that ground but also, whether at this time of year when it is too wet to walk across much of the grass, they will get seen at all. White flowers show their worth at this time of year since they show up from a distance. A few white hellebores at the end of a path that I can see from the house, the indefatigable double white primrose, ‘Petticoat’ that I have used to edge a flower bed at the top of the same path, not in flower yet but a good big group of Galanthus ‘Wasp’ which can be seen from the downstairs lavatory window. Realistically that is how the garden will be most enjoyed at this time of year.

A few things like Hamamelis ‘Pallida’ are enough to draw me down to the other end of the garden to see them and do brighten up the dull days around New Year. At its feet is the long flowering polyanthus primula, ‘June Blake’ a cheerful yellow flower. A lot of the yellow double primroses are in flower: ‘Sunshine Susie’ always in flower in December, and several of the excellent Belarina range. ‘Belarina Goldie’ was a new one last year which is impressing me. It is growing into a very neat plant with golden yellow double flowers backed by a little ruff of a leafy calyx – a jack-in-the-green double. And of course, best of all, the wild primroses are starting to flower. My wild jack-in-the-green primrose is also flowering. I have planted this in an area under an old Cornish hedge along with different varieties of the native Hart’s Tongue ferns. Both plants that you find growing naturally in the hedges around here but the more unusual forms of those plants. They look completely right but a bit more interesting than usual.