Cherrie McIlwaine
Warm grey January weather just doesn鈥檛 do it for me so all felt right with the world during the week when I woke up to find frost on the ground and a welcome chill in the air.
It was a perfect day for a trip to a winter garden, so we headed off to Maurice and Joy Parkinson鈥檚 in Ballyrobert to see what spirit-lifting early signs of spring we could spot.
And they were there in abundance in the bright morning light, those tiny green shoots nosing up through the dark brown of the earth,still scattered in places with the last of the fallen leaves and dressed here and there with velvety green moss.
The first plants to stop us in our tracks were the Hellebores which Maurice and Joy really love and which they grow in abundance.
I always think there is something Elizabethan about Hellebores. Perhaps it鈥檚 the similarity of the flower to the stylised Tudor Rose, but either way they are impossible to beat when it comes to bringing beauty to the garden at this time of the year. The colours range from winter whites and pale creams through to pale mauves and deep dark purples, their petals speckled and delicately stippled. If you can bear to cut them, the flower heads look stunning floated simply in a large glass bowl where you can see their markings more clearly.
The lawn was lush and still white with frost as we moved from island bed to island bed looking for other early signs of spring, Maurice having recently taken the lawn mower to it, to allow the shoots of the Crocus Tomasinianus enough headroom to grow through the blades of grass.
And elsewhere there were assorted clumps and varieties of snowdrops, their delicate colours already faintly visible, egg yolk yellow winter aconites with their bright flowers framed by ruffs of foliage and the bright scarlet stems of dogwood their whippy stems beautiful and bare in elegant contrast.
Winter flowering cherries held their bare branches and blossom laden heads aloft against the sky and the witch hazels did the same, their feathery flowers all spiral and spike and lemony scent.
