This week I paid a visit to an old friend at the Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh. I go every year in early spring and every year I am never disappointed. The old friend is a lovely specimen shrub of Daphne bholua and at this time of year it is smothered with small white/pink tiny flowers with a wonderful intense fragrance. I loitered for a while and admired it and inhaled the fragrance and felt spring is really here.
It is slightly tucked away in a border in front of one of the glass houses and from a distance the small flowers are easy to miss, so I suspect many people don’t give it a second glance. But is you want to find it, it is in the Fossil Courtyard in a border behind the ‘Hard Rain: Whole Earth’ Exhibition.
A visit to the Botanics at this time of year shows you so clearly the rhythm and circle of the garden year, with early spring flowers bursting forth and new shoots breaking through the earth. There were masses of flower buds on the rhododendrons and azaleas which in a month or so will be a blaze of colour. Treasures all….
For information on the Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh see: www.rbge.org.uk
