April: Practicalities and wonder!

Inspired by the bold and characterful crown imperial fritillary, April’s Print-of-the-Month is brighter and more vibrant than many of my other prints.  It’s available to purchase now (until midnight 30th April 2023).

With bright orange bells and lush foliage, Fritillaria imperialis (top of image), is an improbably tropical-looking thing to see flowering on a chilly April day in Derbyshire.  But it does very well here.  This particular species is one that people seem to either love or hate.  Its peculiar, pungent smell perhaps doesn’t help, but to my mind, what it lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up for in character.  

About six months before cutting this particular fritillary, I’d buried its huge, gorgeously gnarly bulb deep into the soil.  They have a hole through their centre, so I dutifully planted it on its side, preventing the hole filling with water and causing rot.

I was late in planting the bulbs that year so they’d taken matters into their own hands, sending out thick, cream-coloured roots… a last-ditch attempt to find a food source for themselves.  Their roots are brittle, so it's impossible not to snap some off when planting at this stage.  When you’re a newbie gardener, this can send you into a frenzy of worry, but you soon realise just how resilient these plants are. Perfectly capable of regenerating the odd broken root.  Still, I try to take care.

The months went by, and in late winter the lush glossy (slightly greasy-looking) leaves came nudging up out of the soil.  They gained a good two or three feet in height before their flower-buds opened out into rich orange bells.  The variety in April’s Print-of-the-Month is ‘Rubra’, which has satisfyingly dark stems and similarly dark veining at the base of its flowers.  

When it came time to cut the flower, I took a length of stem adequate for an arrangement. It’s vital to leave enough behind for photosynthesis to take place, so the bulb can grow a new flower next year. I hoped I hadn’t been too greedy. There’s a tension between wanting more now and wanting more later. 

Half a year after committing that great bulb to the earth, whilst lamenting tardiness and broken roots, I had the joy of holding this flamboyant creation in my hand.  I wondered what on earth I was going to do with it, would anything seasonal complement this weird, tropical thing in Derbyshire’s early spring?  

Pink Camellias!

I tracked some down, then went searching in the glasshouse and found a particularly lovely Icelandic poppy, much more subtle in its colouring than the fritillary, but similarly extravagant with luxuriously ruffled petals.  A good companion!  They both had a feeling of liveliness about them.

I cut the poppy and, for a moment, remembered sowing the seed, fine-as-dust, on a warm late summer’s day, months earlier.  Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder… how on earth this transformation is possible?  Or perhaps, knowing a bit about the science, why is this even possible?  I try to keep one foot rooted in reality and the other caught up in the wonder and awe of it all, especially when involved in the creative process or making anything new.  It brought to mind the last lines of Mary Oliver’s poem The Swan:

“And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?”

Poppies can be a bit tricky to get started, especially Icelandic poppies. Their stems are tiny, thin and delicate, prone to rotting away in a cold wet winter, even in the warmth of a glasshouse.  But with those huge, chiffon petals in mind, we persevere and learn to sow extra.

With the poppy and fritillary in hand, I was excited to have found two such characterful, eye-catching flowers to set alongside a few stems of joyous pink camellias.  

I gathered some special tulips and set about arranging April’s Print-of-the-Month, hopeful I’d do justice to the particular beauty and character of these flowers. I hope you enjoy the result.

It is now available to buy here until the end of April 2023. 

Becky xx

March: A month of contrasts

I’ve been thinking a lot about seasonality recently, and in particular, what exactly I refer to as being ‘seasonal’.  It’s the word I use to describe my photographs because they depict flowers that are blooming together on any given day of the year.  The focus is always on garden plants, often with a few pickings from nature… a leaf or branch here, a catkin there.

So much of my gardening practice has been about extending the seasons, by which I mean, selecting species that will provide us with flowers early and late in the year, often using a controlled environment such as a cool glasshouse or poly-tunnel. On the one hand, these plants are seasonal, a far cry from flowers imported from overseas, but on the other hand, they are not.  

In the countryside where I walk daily, even at this point in the year, the only flowers I come across are snowdrops.   The hazel catkins are turning brown and ivy berries becoming ever-more plump.  There are crocuses too, but I believe these to be garden-escapees, along with odd clumps of daffodils still in bud.  I did however see my first celandine of the year yesterday, revealed through snow melt. We had 12 inches of snow fall this past weekend in Derbyshire. Truly, March can be a month of extreme contrasts.


The remnants of last year’s plant growth are now at their most fragile.  Old seed-heads and rose-hips are disintegrating, becoming intangible from the soil and earth itself.  Their role now is to offer nourishment to new life pushing up from the woodland floor.  Looking down, I can see the foliage of cow parsley, willow herb, celandines and violas coming through and I’m excited to see these clues of flowers to come.  Birdlife is now far more active and noisier than this time last month.  There is a new energy rising and a quickening in growth, though still very few flowers. 

Gardens can tell a very different story of seasonality at this time of year, with hellebores, cyclamen, dwarf iris, forsythia, cherry plum, and the newly blooming daffodils. If we bring glasshouses and poly-tunnels into the mix, there’s even more scope for flowery abundance in March. The camellias and Icelandic poppies in this new print were both grown in glasshouses, and they feel luxurious and extravagant when compared with the scene outdoors.  They’re all the more enjoyable and enlivening for the contrast.

The single fritillaria raddeana in the top left of the image is a species I have come to love. It reliably flowers outside in March.  Although it has its origins in rocky areas of Iran, Kashmir and Turkmenistan, it flowers perfectly well in Derbyshire at this time of year, and therefore earns the label of being seasonal.  I like to plant their bulbs in small terracotta pots in the autumn, so I can keep them on a table and appreciate the flowers close up, as they don’t grow particularly tall.

When collecting the flowers for the photograph (above), I was fortunate enough to have access to a magnificent stachyurus praecox to cut from.  These wonderful shrubs, which are curiously rare in gardens, have exquisite bell-shaped flowers, pale yellow and very small, which hang down in racemes (a little like catkins).  They’re also robust and not badly damaged by late frosts, which makes them such a treat at the end of winter.

Perhaps though, it’s when we see the first daffodils and our native primula vulgaris that we make the mental switch from winter to spring.  In both of these March prints, I’ve veered towards choosing daffodils of the palest yellow and white.  Those in the print below, along with the soft pink scilla and muscari add lightness to the darker tones in the fritillaries.  The fritillaries in this photograph include (from left to right): Fritillaria persica, meleagris and elwesii.   

The F. persica here, which has a spire of dark maroon bells, was treated with great care when cut for this photograph, as it’s notoriously tricky to grow. Often it’ll show great promise by sending up healthy glaucous foliage, only to disappoint when the flower buds fail to develop.   If I was the type of gardener inclined to become obsessed with one genus in particular, Fritillaria would most definitely be my genus of choice.  Along with hellebores perhaps.

This photograph above was taken in early spring when I was living in Washington state in the US.  The very first dandelions had appeared and just gone to seed.  I included one in this composition to mark that early moment in the season, when the joy of new growth is juxtaposed with a rapidly increasing number of tasks for the gardener and cut flower grower.  The new season is underway.

Both of these prints are available during March 2023, a month of extreme contrasts here in Derbyshire with thick snow contrasted with bright yellow forsythia and intense frosts threatening the celandines.  The link to the shop is here.