The emphasis at this dark time of year is on the little flowers we bring indoors. Just now it is a respectable cluster on the kitchen table: in one vase, with no water, half a dozen pussy willow twigs keep their fluffy little white catkins unchanged week after week. Add water and they will turn yellow with pollen and green with leaves. Another vase holds Daphne bholua, Sarcococca hookeriana and a pink camellia called Top Hat, the scents of the first two making up for the sadly scentless camellia.
At Christmas we were given a subscription to a wonderful cut-flower service called Bloom & Wild: their first despatch is still here, an arrangement of pale flowers I would not normally see and sadly can’t even name. They arrived through the letterbox, ingeniously inert, apparently in a state of suspended animation. After two days in a vase they have absorbed water and life to become a picture of a rather exotic spring.
