12 jolly flowers for Easter!🐣

A late Easter can be a joyous thing, especially if it’s preceded by a fortnight of gorgeous weather! 

All the spring flowers are leaping up and we each have our favourites to enchant us while we munch Hot Cross Buns and shameful amounts of chocolate..

Ah, spring is such a lovely time of year – nothing in the garden looks dusty or tired yet, and all the plants (including the weeds!) are as keen for action as a basket of puppies. As I step outside, I meet the lovely mass of white flowers covering 1. Abutilon vitifolium ‘Tennants White’.  My specimen is at least twenty years old now, a redoubtable old lady in abutilon terms, and still she twinkles and sparkles every April and May.

Round the next corner 2. a sheet of short-stemmed epimedium flowers dance around like pixie-hats in their half-shady spot .  Glad I remembered to take off all the old leaves a month ago or they would have obscured every little bloom!

That’s enough dainty prettiness for now.  Much beefier and jollier are the 3. wildly partying wallflowers in front of 4. a golden philadelphus – BOOM! That’s a combination about as understated as President Trump’s ego and Laura, with her snooty disdain for anything ‘common’ will be huffing (Caroline will be more sympathetic, I feel), but I think they’re glorious. The scent of warm wallflowers is knockout, too.

I’m finishing with a plant that Laura gave me, however, so I mustn’t be too scoffing of her choices.  5. Euphorbia ‘Humpty Dumpty’ is quite a squat example of a spurge with blue-green leaves and fabulously bright lime-yellow flowers adorned with eyes that darken to chocolatey-brown. Just perfect for Easter zing…….

Hmmm nice as Elaine’s choices are if they were chocolate eggs they would be solid old Cadbury’s Dairy Milk wouldn’t they? The only really classy plant in there was the Euphorbia ‘Humpty Dumpty’ which I gave her. I think you’ll find that my choices are much more Green and Blacks…

Let’s start with the classic Easter plant, the pasqueflower or 6. Pulsatilla. The plain species P. vulgaris is stunning in itself (and is our featured photo at the top of the blog this week) but you can add variations in colour such as white and red or include a different species such as P. halleri, the flower in the foreground of the photo below

Other stars this Easter star are 7. my little maddenii rhododendrons. If you admire rhododendrons but don’t have the room in your garden for them, these dwarf species are a good fix. Slightly tender I keep mine under glass over the winter but as they are epiphytic in the wild they prefer to be root-bound in smallish pots, so easy to manage.

Another rarely seen but interesting tweak on perennial sweet peas is 8. this little spring flowering Lathyrus vernus, happily flowering in my spring border.

My final choice was a kind favour from a dear friend of Caroline’s who gallantly purchased some rarities for me from the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh when they had a pop-up sale of plants from their renowned Chilean collection. I expect E and C will again accuse me of horticultural elitism but 9. the saw-toothed azara is well-known enough to have been awarded the RHS’s Award of Garden Merit so Thank You Margaret!!

Saw-toothed azara? I have NEVER heard of it and Elaine’s right, in my world even wallflowers are posh – horticultural ‘old money’ – and to prove it, my choice for Easter excitement is: 10. aubrieta. Is there a wall in the UK that isn’t looking better for having a mound of aubrietia tumbling down it? No point in putting this question to Laura obviously, but it’s a five-star recommendation for fans of my gardening style. 

Basically, buy it for next to nothing, wedge it in a rocky crevice, then forget about it. No need for pruning, mulching, tying in or deadheading. Just stand back and blush just ever so slightly as the compliments roll in.

Will you have poppies in flower for Easter? I hope mine will break out. There’s something ridiculously tantalising and slightly naughty about those hairy pods full of petals waiting to burst open about now in a burst of colour. Best of all mine are bright blue, being 11. meconopsis, which love our Highland climate and acid soil but don’t like growing for my sisters down south – have I mentioned this before?

Finally – 12. my auriculas which almost look too classy for me with their delicate colour pattern (even Laura likes them) but are perfectly happy to be generally abandoned. Look at their over-achievement despite the -13s we had post-Christmas (my lavender reacted somewhat differently). 

I leave you with a seasonal message from my masa basjoo (banana plant.) Neglected all winter and a contender for the compost heap, it has entered into the spirit and come back from the dead – Easter is truly all around!

We’d love to hear what your favourite Easter garden beauties are! Do write in and let us know …..

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Think Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’ but with a lot more subtlety and you’ll get to Louise’s Great Plant this Month. Isn’t it simply gorgeous? Find out what Louise loves most about it here

We 3Growbags are very, very impressed with what a brilliant idea Woolpots are! They are zero-waste pots made of biodegradable knitted and washed wool fleece (giving a new market for sheep farmers too). No chemicals, no plastic – they even deter molluscs! Caroline has been busy using wool pots to pot on her cosmos seedlings – see how she did it, and then order some for your potting-on tasks from our shop.

As we continue our crash course on veg growing, here are 4 more that you could get going on right now – click on the links to find out more!

Broad beans

Onions

Runner beans, peas and carrots

Tomatoes