As the winter we’d rather forget crawls painfully slowly to its denoument (and the Daily Express confounds yet again with an inexplicably gleeful headline warning of another cold snap next week) mother nature finally slaps an ace on the table and delivers something to cheer us up….

Light at the end of the tunnel

Rather late in the day of course – these guys usually wow us in early January – but we can understand their reticence given the Siberian weather we had this year. And they’re here now, so let’s just applaud their appearance.

This is Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’, and has just come into flower. It’s cousin H. i. ‘Jelena’ (a wonderful burnt orange which we were waxing lyrical about a year ago) seems to be a week or so earlier.

If you’re near RHS garden Rosemoor there are some spectacular specimens in their winter garden. Although ours are considerably smaller (well they’re the RHS after all) we keep reminding ourselves that Rosemoor is actually a very young garden, so it won’t be long before ours catch up!

If you’re nearer us here in Shropshire, there is a national collection of Hamamelis just down the road near Wolverhampton.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 16:39 and is filed under Plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.