Indoor colour gives way to outdoor colour

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Spring is here with our garden stirring wherever we look, no doubt stimulated by the high temperatures last week (but frost some nights this week). Our snowdrop patch is still flowering and the first daffodil opened up last week. The hellebores are flowering well and we have a nice patch of crocus on the verge outside our house.

We’ve had some interesting indoor colour to brighten up the last days of winter. Our hibiscus has sat on the windowsill all winter being bathed by the radiator heat from below but kept damp and humid from watering its saucer. As a result it has made regular flowers throughout the wiunter.

The star at the moment is the amaryllis. I got the bulb in the form of a Christmas present from my neighbour, so I popped it in compost to see what would happen. I’ve never grown one before, so it was good to see it push up leaves in quick time. It has grown two flower stems, the first had two flowers, which lasted three weeks before going off (in the background of the later pictures) and the current one has three flowers.

The conservatory registered 35 degrees on a sunny day this week, so time to start ventilating. It has had a continuous set of winter flowers from my various geraniums and an echeveria which produced three giant flowering stems in the autumn and is still in bloom now, although the main rosette is now a bit of a sorry sight on a longish stem.