Snaps from the RHS show

An outstanding display of reticulata irises from Jacques Amand in the front of the hall at the RHS flower show last Friday, covering both old and new cultivars. Friday is a first for me in my RHS show-going career, but there was certainly a large turn-out later in the day.

Avon Bulbs' snowdrops were the centre of attraction for the many assembled galanthophiles.

Galanthus 'Excelsis' exhibited by Avon Bulbs.

A vibrant display from Broadleigh Gardens covering the whole range of early bulbs.

Rapture

A display of sweet violets was charming - and I don't recall seeing such a stand at the February show before.

Viola 'Pink Czar'

The sumptuous foliage and flowers of Impatiens morsei on Dibleys' stand.

In the Woody Plant Committee meeting we were shown a range of the best new introductions of Hamamelis by Chris Lane - a wonderful assortment, greatly enhancing the options available.

Edgeworthia chrysantha 'Grandiflora' from Exbury, passed round in the meeting: it is strongly and not pleasantly scented. 

Not just snowdrops at Colesbourne Park

Cyclamen coum and Galanthus 'S. Arnott', originally planted together in about 2004. This was a wonderful stock of Cyclamen from a Dutch supplier, superb in colour and extremely vigorous, spreading well and coming true from seed.  

Crocus imperati

Sunday was the best day we've had for months, calm, mild and sunny, with bees out and busy - at the least, an intimation of spring, much needed after the winter's storms. I was fortunate enough to spend it at Colesbourne Park, where the snowdrops were looking better than ever, and the richness of colour possible in the winter garden was very much on show too. It was nice to be back there with no duties, and free to enjoy the garden as a visitor - but with the memories of making it.

The 'spring bling' bed, planted in 2011. Bergenia 'Godfrey Owen' and Yucca 'Color Guard' are conspicuous.

Galanthus nivalis on the lake banks - a genetically diverse, self-sowing population, never forming big clumps.

Galanthus elwesii 'Pat Mason'

Galanthus 'James Backhouse'

Lakeside planting: Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire'  with reeds and other shrubs: the lake was even bluer than usual.

One of my favourite trees: Acer cappadocicum in the park

The Shaftesbury Snowdrop Festival

To commemorate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in Shaftesbury, Dorset, a project was launched to plant public spaces in the town with snowdrops. 60,000 were planted in 2012, and the same number last year, with volunteers and schoolchildren helping. These plantings, now getting established and showing their potential, are the foundation of the Shaftesbury Snowdrop Festival. This aims, of course, to bring more visitors to the historic hilltop town out of season, but is also getting the community involved through art displays and the various events organised. The opening day of this year's festival (continuing until 1 March) was yesterday, and was marked by a snowdrop study day and sale. With three speakers, the sale and an excellent lunch, the day was a great success, and we then had chance to see the plantings in the town and a garden nearby. There are the makings of an annual galanthophile fixture here!



Some of the 120,000 snowdrops planted in the past couple of years in Shaftesbury by townsfolk and schoolchildren. They'll soon thicken up.

The snowdrop sale attracted the usual frenzy of interest.

The Bet Lynch of the snowdrop scene: Alan Street pulls on the Avon Bulbs stall.

A pop-up shop selling all sorts of snowdroppy items.

Moira Harries surveys the exhibit of snowdrop-inspired art in the Shaftesbury Art Centre.

Emma Thick explains the fine points of snowdrop identification at the display of named cultivars in the grounds of Shaftesbury Abbey.

Rough weather

Better inside than out.

As I write the wind is again wuthering round the chimney stack and rain lashing against the windows, as we receive the current storm hurled across the Atlantic by the jetstream. Here in eastern North Yorkshire we have got off comparatively lightly from the effects of this winter's weather, the brunt of it being relieved for us by the southern and western parts of these islands. A friend's Facebook post this morning drew my attention to a remarkable animation of the weather systems in the North Atlantic for the past couple of months, from the surfers' webpage magicseaweed.com. It is well worth watching (here), as it gives a very dramatic idea of what has come this way. With the jetstream apparently fixed in a standing wave across North America, between warm air and the polar air mass, it seems that we are set for a continuation of the same for some time to come, presumably until returning Spring warms up the landmasses. I use the BBC weather pages for day-to-day weather information, but find it very helpful to look at what the jetstream is doing on netweather.com's jetstream forecast page. This long run of lows is of course the opposite of the extended cold easterly flow we endured last spring, and of the two I prefer the westerlies. But they have caused a lot of trouble and damage that takes longer to fix than a delayed spring.

The Settringon Beck, outside my house, in spate after a downpour. Being close to its source it rises and falls very rapidly, soon returning to its normal narrow bed.

A serious casualty of wind on Wednesday: an enormous Tilia platyphyllos in the Castle Howard avenue crashed down across the entry to the Yorkshire Arboretum. Its partner in the avenue for three hundred years was removed (being rotten) in January and the gap let the wind in. Pic by Anna Porter.

The dismembered lime-tree on Thursday, when the size of the tree was more easily appreciated. These main trunks are 20 m long. Luckily nobody was around as it came down.

Between depressions have been calm, bright and quite mild days; Galanthus elwesii 'Comet' flowering here on Friday.

A good dinner makes one forget the storms - a fig frangipane for friends last Saturday:

and so does a nice fire, here burning the cones of Pinus x schwerinii.

Fair and bright

A lovely, warmish day has seemed like the first spring day, with flowers opening on many of the early flowers, including this Galanthus nivalis 'Fiona's Gold'

Eranthis hyemalis 'Lightning'

Eranthis hyemalis 'Schwefelglanz'

A happy sight for the croconut: Crocus herbertii.

Primula vulgaris with Polypodium and Cyclamen coum.

Galanthus 'Bertram Anderson'

Into the snowdrop season

Galanthus 'Rosie'

Although snowdrops have been flowering for months, 'the season' is just getting going in its increasingly frantic way. The first event, the snowdrop sale at Myddelton House, occurred last Saturday and was apparently a great success, with the 'snow wolves' (as someone described them on Facebook) being in fine form as they ran to snap up choice morsels from the sales tables. The Daily Telegraph reports today on a nicely green-marked discovery made there on Saturday by Matt Bishop. Ebay sales are also in full flow, with Galanthus elwesii 'Kencot Ripple' currently the front-runner for the year, having sold recently for £468, causing ripples aplenty across the social media.

Next weekend there will be the Alpine Garden Society's snowdrop day in Stratford and many others will occur through February. A major absence is the Galanthus Gala, but an alternative, developed to fill the gap, is the Snowdrop Study, Sale and Social day on 15 February, taking place as part of the Shaftesbury Snowdrops Festival in Dorset. As with the Gala there will be a selection of vendors selling interesting snowdrops, on this occasion including Matt Bishop, Richard and Val from Woodchippings, Joe Sharman's Monksilver Nursery and Tom Mitchell's Evolution Plants, and talks. I'm speaking on the subject of 'Primrose Warburg and her garden at South Hayes',  accompanying Andy Byfield (speaking on  Turkish species) and Melvyn Jope (Greek autumn-flowering snowdrops). The organisers have made it very clear that this is a social event, not just a study day, so I hope to get chance to socialise with all these friends - and many others as well. The programme and booking information is available here.

Colesbourne Park will be open as usual each weekend in February and the first weekend of March (info here) - I look forward to a visit in due course. I'm also hoping to get to Austwick Hall, at the other side of North Yorkshire, where my friends Michael and Eric have created a snowdrop walk over the past several years. They are open on various days in February.

I see from pictures online that the flowering season is well advanced in southern gardens, but here in North Yorkshire it is still comparatively early and the majority of my snowdrops are still some way off flowering. These are a few whose pictures I took during a lull in the rain on Saturday. It was raining and cold yesterday too, when Julia Lewis of Radio York visited to interview 'a North Yorkshire galanthophile' for her programme to be broadcast on Sunday morning - I hope I conveyed something of the charm and fascination of snowdrops.

G. elwesii 'Rosemary Burnham'

'Clovis' - a lopsided curiosity.

G. elwesii 'Harewood Twin'

Panning for seeds

Sorbus pseudohupehensis in October: one of the many species of Sorbus that produce genetically identical seedlings through apomixis. 

My post 'Celebrating Sorbus' (8 December 2013) prompted a colleague at an American botanical garden to request some seed, so before Christmas I gathered bunches of fruits of different species to extract seed from. Gathering seed from any collection of garden plants is fraught with the risk of unwelcome hybridisation and in general such seed is not useful where accurately named material for research is needed. But many species of Sorbus, as with other members of the Rosaceae, produce seed by apomixis, which  means that there is no fertilisation and no recombination of genes and that in consequence the seedlings are genetically identical to the parent plant - and thus safe to distribute.

The fruits of each species ripen at different times and become variably softened as they do so. Some of the pink-fruited ones, like S. pseudohupensis and its relatives, remain very hard for a long time into the winter (which is why they give such a long season of interest), while many orange- or white-fruited species have softened and gone long ago. To encourage the softening process, as extracting seed from hard fruits is a very tough job, I bagged each collection in a plastic bag and left them to sweat in a warmish place (nowhere in this house being aptly described as warm).

Sorbus and Cotoneaster fruits going squishy in sealed plastic bags.

 Today, having some spare time, I cleaned the seeds, using a very useful technique I learnt when cleaning tomato seeds long ago in Holland. The fruits are squashed firmly but gently, breaking open their skins and releasing the bulb and seeds. This is most easily done by squeezing the fruit through the bags. After this the squashy (and somewhat smelly) mess is tipped into a bowl of water and stirred round. Another rub of the fruits will wash the seeds out of the pulp. Being the densest objects in the 'soup' the seeds will sink to the bottom of the bowl and the light, floating sludge can be be gently poured off the top.

The first stage of cleaning: fruit pulp in a bowl of water.

This will leave a little heap of the heavier material at the bottom, with a certain amount of extraneous gubbins. Clean water is added and successive washings and stirrings, with the floating debris being carefully poured off each time, will leave almost pure clean seed in the bottom of the bowl. It's exactly the same principle as that employed in panning for gold - the heaviest particles are left at the bottom of the pan - but can be done in the comfort of the kitchen, and with the certainty of finding something useful at the end. The number of washings will vary but two or three will usually suffice.

After the final wash: almost pure seed left in a little water.

A final swirl of water is used to wash the seed into a sieve, from which it's tapped out onto a sheet of kitchen roll. There will be a few impurities left, but these are most easily removed once the seed is dry by the usual blowing and vibrating techniques used to purify a seed sample. I'm giving the seed I'm keeping  a couple of weeks in the fridge before I sow it: most Sorbus seed needs a long cool period for best germination, so this will at least help them along the way.

Almost pure Sorbus seed knocked out of a sieve onto kitchen roll.