Gardening
Candlemas
Denis Wood;
On Candlemas Day, February 2, the sun sets an hour later than on the shortest day; already the first Precursors of spring respond to lengthening light. In my garden the leafless twigs of the Comelian Cherry. C'ornus mas, are covered
With pale yellow flowers like gold dust. This Cornel, as it is also known, is a native of Britain; its bright red fruits-were once picked for food and its hard, close-grained wood used for javelins and spears. It makes a small tree up to twenty feet, tending to become confused and twiggy unless imaginatively pruned after flowering to clear the branch structure.
David's Peach, Prunus davidiana; is another small tree of about the same size. Pere Jean Pierre Armand David (1826-1900), °Pe of the great French missionaries and plant collectors in China, sent the seed of this plant to Paris about 1865 and reported that it was a beautiful spectacle in districts near Peking. It is a beautiful tree here too in February, its bare branches wreathed with small white peach flowers. If these are not to be caught by spring's disabling cold, the tree ought to be Planted in a warm sheltered position looking towards the south. Some Christmas Roses will still be holding up their white anemone flowers above the mud, and the first of the Lenten Roses, with flowers in mysterious modulations of green, grey-pink and grey Purple, can also be seen, but this is Chiefly the time of the strange, Withdrawn, green Hellebores. H. vindis, about sixteen inches high, has half-drooping flowers made up Of bright green petal-like sepals; it a rare native but has been taken into nurserymen's catalogues, as also has H. foetidus, a stouter, taller plant, about two feet high, With bell-shaped flowers in Panicles; pale green with greyPurple rims, it has deeply cut dark green leaves. Another is t. cor8,Lcus (or lividus corsicus), less nardy than the other two and needing a sheltered position. It grows to eighteen inches with glaucous, spiny leaves and greygreen flowers informed with the characteristic Hellebore grey-pink. Hellebores have been too much 1.1eglected; once seen they become 'rldispensable plants, evergreen, roade-bearing, perfect in positions oking to the north at the foot of Walls or the edge of a bed of Shrubs. They are content in limey r)ils with a good, deep mixture of ,eaf soil well supplied with water, oU t well drained also. The firm Called The Plantsmen of Holwell (Sherborne, Dorset), have made a sPeciality of Hellebores and have tlanY specially selected strains of orientalis, the Lenten Rose. t Snowdrops and aconites go well °gether, all in separate drifts
Intermingling only it the edges. I have seen them in water meadows near Kingham in Oxfordshire, making a carpet under tall blue willows. In my garden the slightly greenish-yellow buttercup flowers of winter aconites in green tobyruffs twinkle up at hazel catkins swinging and dancing in the trees above them.
Many of these first flowers have a quality of primitive innocence, as of candlelight, fitting for the presentation in the temple of a first-born Child, when the old man's nunc dimittis ended, "... Lumen ad revelationem gentium,et gloriamplebis tuae Israel." That light was not a searchlight but a candle, a light that has nothing to do with crises of power and energy, a candle of beeswax, . . .9 ut jussu tuo per opera apum, hunc liquorem ad perfectionem cerei venire fecisti....'
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