Early blooms

Enticed by the wonderful weather last weekend and with our Bloom exhibition in Cheltenham in September in mind, I took photographs on two walks of the first hints of spring in the hedgerows and along the edge of a local wood. There were many examples of blooms to choose from. The extraordinary weather had encouraged flowering so early in the year.

There were many springtime yellows, first of all that lovely, optimistic early buttercup, the Celandine.

There were miniature daffodils on the edge of a wood. Did they escape from a nearby garden or were they deliberately planted? 

And then, there were banks of primroses, often seen from the car with no chance of stopping to photograph so shown here a single clump just coming out on the edge of the same wood. 

Walking further on in the sunshine, I found delicate blue common field (?) speedwell, 

and a few clumps of deep purple crocuses.

Then there was something quite different - maybe the earliest of all flowers to appear - on hazel bushes growing freely beside a lake in the Cotswold Water Parks. 

This bush was spectacularly covered in catkins (the male flower), now nearly at the end of their flowering period. The catkin is of course a flower but so different in character from most others and the hazel is the most hard-working of bushes. It has to produce vast quantities of pollen to ensure at least some is wind-blown to fertilise the tiny red female flowers - hence the long muli-flowered catkins. 

Of all these flowers, I suspect the one that may finally find its way into work for the exhibition is the celandine but time will tell. 

Margaret Robbie