Why I am blown away by windflowers

On Tuesday it will be four years since the first lockdown started in Britain. Four years, so soon? The 2020 ban caught me finishing a book with complex notes and bibliography and only four hours’ notice that all university libraries were about to close. I was thrown back on the garden and in the following weeks I intensified my knowledge of it at a micro level. Many of you too engaged closely with yours in the greatest surge of gardening in my lifetime. Yearly, the memory returns: we look on late March through a lockdown lens.

This year’s vista is interestingly different. In late March 2020, my companions beyond the window were the Covid-proof small narcissi which edged the beds in my main lawn and were just coming into flower, Jack Snipe, an excellent choice, to the fore. This year the narcissi have been flowering from March 2. Since 2020, so many plants in Britain have been on fast-forward. My most unseasonal sight is a scattering of white flowers on Exochorda Snow White, a shrub planted to be at its peak in mid-May. It is flowering two months early.

This mild winter has erased British memories of the late snow and sharp frost in March 2022. Warming, we assume, has resumed an upward trajectory. In the March lockdown, I appreciated the lavender-purple flowers on Iris lazica, a robust fan-leaved iris which I much recommend. On lockdown’s fourth anniversary, lazica’s flowers are already fading.

In 2020 I was cut off from London’s camellias but FT readers kept me in touch by sending photos of their urban camellias, none finer than those of the single white alba simplex in flower in Clapham. This year, camellias have already been flowering superbly for weeks. They like the mild rain and have had almost none of the frost which browns their flowers.

This time four years ago, I was locked down and going solo, and so I was grateful to be allowed to go out for walks in the surrounding country. Within a week I had a poetic experience which would have eluded me otherwise, a hedgerow in which wild flowers were proliferating, just as Shelley described in his visionary poem “The Question”, composed in 1820.

In a dream, he wrote, he saw how “bare winter suddenly was changed to spring” and in a hedgerow daisies and oxlips were flowering, bluebells were emerging and “tall” flowers were wetting their faces with Heaven’s tears. These tearful flowers have puzzled his readers, but I take them to be Crown Imperials, tall fritillaries whose hanging flowers indeed contain drops like tears beside their nectaries. They are wild flowers in Iran, not British hedgerows, but Shelley was dreaming and in a more grounded way there were also “wind-flowers and violets” in the hedge he conjured up. Below my hedgerow in real life, there were windflowers and violets too, among daisies and emerging bluebells. In Shelley’s dream the windflowers were “pied wind-flowers”, but those before me in reality were white and pink on separate plants, a few inches high.

Windflowers are anemones, so called because the wind is supposed to help their flowers to open. The ones in the hedge were Anemone nemorosa, happy in light shade and leafy soil in gardens. In his dream Shelley ended by hastening to his starting point with a bunch of his dream-hedge’s flowers “that I might there present it! — Oh! To whom?” Like him, I had nobody to bunch, locked down alone. Alerted to their beauty, I did not pick them. I returned to hunt for plants online, the searching which became a lockdown obsession. The results of my hunt have been flowering in the garden this month. They would flower in yours, too, if you gave them a site away from full sun.

Woodland anemones flower in spring and then die away. They grow well in pots in a shady urban courtyard or balcony where they can be moved out of the limelight when their season of flower is over in May. On the strength of Shelley and my locked-out walk, I ordered a pale blue, a pale pink and a large white one. The national collection of woodland anemones is held at Avondale Nursery in Coventry, but this year’s catalogue advertises only a few for sale as potted plants.

I hunted for windflowers online, the searching which became a lockdown obsession. The results of my hunt have been flowering in the garden this month

A far bigger range is offered by Potterton’s in Lincolnshire, who send them out more cheaply as bare rhizomes in September and October. In 2020 I ordered mine for autumn delivery and waited. As advised, I planted the rhizomes lengthways, or horizontally, just below the surface of a specially made patch of leafy soil. They have loved it and after flowering this year they will be ready to be divided, making more. They have been my best investment.

My three woodland anemones are Anemone nemorosa Robinsoniana, whose flowers are a superb ice blue; Wisley Pink, whose flat flowers are a darker shade of pink on their undersides; and Vestal, whose white flowers are double and freely produced. There are many more, carefully selected and propagated, but you will have to wait until autumn to order their rhizomes, the cheapest source of those that are flowering beautifully now. They are worth the wait, only six months ahead, but then they realise a Shelley-like vision of beauty, not pied but delicately coloured. I owe the impulse behind mine to the grim days of first lockdown, 2020.

I have been blown away by windflowers but perhaps you are impatient and want quicker results. You will not find these anemones in a British hedgerow, but De Caen anemones are one of the bargains of spring bulb catalogues. They are not just for autumn planting. Corms can be ordered now and planted on arrival. They will then flower vividly in July. De Caen anemones are best known as flowers in bunches from florists in spring and early summer, but they are excellent value in gardens, except in those with heavy clay soils and cold winters.

My tip is to soak the corms overnight in cold water before planting them and then give them about three inches of soil above their upper surface. They are happy in limey soil and unless a really cold winter freezes them they will return from year to year. The florist trade has encouraged fine ones to be bred and selected. Hollandia is an intense scarlet with a dark centre surrounded by a narrow white ring. Mr Fokker is a vivid shade of violet with black central stamens and Bi-color has a white base with a wide ring of rose red nearer its centre. A mixture of all three, bought separately, can be made by tipping them out to muddle themselves in a bowl before planting.

De Caen anemones would only be a dream in a hedgerow, but they look far better in a pot on a balcony or terrace, placed in sun. The limits of lockdown four years ago made me more aware of what anemones can offer. It is a lesson I have carried forward since.

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