EMERGING PLANTS
After a few days of relatively mild weather, I see more plants when venturing out on my daily garden rounds. In the wood bed, the crumpled foliage of woodland wildling town hall clock, Adoxa
moschatellina, is just starting to emerge. I love the five tiny, pale ‘clock face’ flowers which appear in April. It runs in moist, woodsy soil, so is best for wilder garden plantings. A more restrained spreading woodlander is the mouse plant, Arisarum proboscideum.
This Mediterranean native is pushing up dark green, arrowhead-shaped foliage. Its spathes, reminiscent of small, brown-bodied mouse bottoms disappearing into the undergrowth, will follow a little later on. Like the adoxa, the foliage dies down in summer. Elsewhere, thrusting bright pink buds of earlier-flowering
Paeonia lactiflora are appearing. Somewhat different is the exquisite, lemon-flowered P. daurica mlokosewitschii. The latter is putting up rich scarlet, knobby new growth covered in a waxy bloom. I must not put mulch directly on top of the emerging buds, as it could rot them.