Spring has arrived and brought with it the first horticultural signs of new life…
feast your eyes on the beauty of Spring!
These are the first signs in my part of the world…how do they compare to yours?
Snowdrop © Lisa Shambrook
Snowdrop (Galanthus): I adore the tiny British Snowdrop, I look forward to its little nodding head and vibrant green marks. It’s a sign that winter is beginning to draw to a close. It generally flowers before the vernal equinox marking the arrival of spring in the middle of March, but can flower from midwinter on.
Vinca © Lisa Shambrook
Vinca (commonly known as periwinkle): This always delights me with that shock of purple spreading like a carpet of blue across the woodland floor and winding up tree stumps. In India the plant is known as sadaphuli meaning ‘always flowering’.
Scilla © Lisa Shambrook
Scilla: Blue seems to be the colour for spring, and the dainty, delicate Scilla peeps out of the bare ground in the early months of the year. It’s usually native to woodlands and meadows where I live.
Chionodoxa © Lisa Shambrook
Chionodoxa: Another beautiful blue bulb known as glory-of-the-snow also opens its petals in the early months, and produces some of the truest blue in all horticulture. Its tiny starry-eyed flowers brighten up the early months.
Narcissus Family © Lisa Shambrook
Daffodil/Narcissi (Narcissus): Perhaps the most famous spring flowers in every array of sunshine yellow you can imagine. Generally small narcissi flower first, heralding spring and paving the way for the daffodils and their huge trumpets of colour.
Primroses (Primula vulgaris) and cowslips (Primula veris): Meadow flowers that spread through fields, woodlands and everywhere they can. The primrose was Benjamin Disraeli’s favourite flower, and cowslips are my mother’s favourite. Hardy and one of the first splashes of creamy yellow as the days get warmer.
Wild Violets © Lisa Shambrook
Wild violets (Violaceae): As much as I love pansies and violas, I can’t imagine spring without the tiny wild violets that pop up from nowhere and spread through the garden’s nooks and crannies, and their colours are softly beautiful.
Oxalis © Lisa Shambrook
Oxalis (Oxalis acetosella): There are many varieties of oxalis, but the common wood sorrel is the one I love best. The fragile petals have delicate stripes in the palest of pink and remind me of fairy dresses. The leaves can be eaten, but are quite sour.
Wood Anemone © Lisa Shambrook
Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa): These white flowers can be starry shaped or have big petals like fairy wings, and swathe the woodland floor in March and April like a galaxy of stars. One of my all-time delicate favourites.
Forget-me-not © Lisa Shambrook
Forget-me-not (Myosotis): Another true blue of the horticultural world. In a German legend, God named all the plants when a tiny unnamed one cried out, “Forget-me-not, O Lord!” God replied, “That shall be your name.”. These are truly unforgettable sky-blue little flowers that in a clump can look simply stunning.
Bluebells © Lisa Shambrook
Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta): This flower becomes your bonus (number eleven) in this post. It’s my favourite flower and will have a post all of its own…but for now…enjoy another bonus of spring and the prominent blue that blankets the woodland in April and May.
Like I said…this is my little corner of the world, Wales in the UK…
how fares yours this Spring?
What are your favourite Spring flowers?
If you’d like to see more of my flower photography please take a look at my
Flickr page and The Shutterworks Photoblog…
The Last Krystallos 
White or yellow, purple or blue, they are all my favorites because spring is here.
No flowers here yet and snow is forecast for Easter weekend. Yay. Brr.
Snow! We’re hoping for a warm Easter weekend, but it’s likely to be wet… What part of the world are you in to be getting snow? I’d have liked snow a few months ago, but a bit late in Wales to get any now! lol
I’m in Canada. So far we’d had rain and more rain. Good for flowers. Hope they’re wrong about the snow. It wouldn’t stay long anyway. 😀
Great pictures! It reminds me, however, that I’m way behind in posting any of my pictures…
The UK Bluebells appear to be similar to the wood hyacinths I find around where I live (they may be introduced, I’m not sure).
The bluebells we know here are Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica). They can blanket an area of woodland with blue, just as your bluebells do, though with a lighter shade of blue.
And we have the snowdrops, vinca, daffodils, and some form of the others around, too. We’re a bit behind you in the blooming schedule where I live (though probably not more than a week), so the early ones are only up in the areas that get good sun.
Must find my camera!
BTW: The Federal Government in DC shut down on March 5 for snow, and we’ve had a few flurries since then, so I guess the cold weather stays a little longer around here than in Wales!
It’s been a few years since we got more than a flurry of snow…so we get excited when it happens! The carpets of bluebells are my favourite…so much so that my books incorporate them intrinsically!