Monday 21 March 2011

Pink Fizz

Yesterday was the Spring Equinox when the length of the day was equal to the length of the night. So from now until the Autumn Equinox, 23 September, the days are longer than the nights. Hurrah! 

Japanese quince
Our weather forecast is for blue skies and temperatures in the middle to high teens all this week and in celebration the flowers round our house have gone into a bit of a pink fizz. 

budding peach tree
The Japanese quince is probably at its best right now and our little peach tree--12 peaches last autumn; is just about breaking into flower. Don't think we'll have to wait long for our cherry trees either but they're not quite as far along as the peach.

The larches are still going strong but the wild cherry plum has finished so the bees have decamped to somewhere else for now. They'll be back soon when our lime tree flowers; it has just opened its first leaves.

1st lime leaves
We also have a bit of an anomaly. We have loads and loads of  'normal' cowslips with their clusters of acid yellow flowers and the odd wild primula whose flowers are the same colou,r but just underneath our oldest walnut tree we have a single clump of renegade cowslip with a variant colourway. It's a lovely reddish colour. So although it's not pink we've included it anyway :-)

variant colour cowslip

3 comments:

GaynorB said...

When I first read the title I was expecting something about sparkling wines or champagne!
The flowers are lovely though, I just hope ours are still flowering when we arrive.

Tim said...

I wonder if the cowslip has crossed naturally with one of the multi-flowered primulas... and your fabulous RED cowslip is the result.
Oxlips and cowslips readily cross and I think that the multi-flowered primulas are derived from the oxlip.
You will have to propagate it and should call it something like D***ies Bull's Blood... or Charnizay Crimson. We'll buy a plant if the price is right.

Niall & Antoinette said...

@Gaynor: I know but as we're having a froth of pink flowers right now I couldn't resist. Will blog about pink bubbly sometime--promise :-)

@Tim: it is lovely isn't it. If we can propagate it you're welcome to an offspring. Great name: Charnizay Crimson.