Winter Aconite

Photo by Gayla Trail  All Rights Reserved

Early season blooms have started to appear this week in tandem with some other solid signs that we’ve turned a corner away from winter and closer to the start of spring here in my neck of the woods. While most gardeners are raving about the snowdrops — and they are beautiful, no doubt — I was most delighted to see another, though less popular harbinger of the season, Eranthis hyemalis unfurling in the sun for the first time.

Gardeners often complain about the difficulty in establishing eranthis, but most of my experiences with this early bloom have been with plants that appeared mysteriously from nowhere and established themselves with no work at all.

Gayla Trail
Gayla is a writer, photographer, and former graphic designer with a background in the Fine Arts, cultural criticism, and ecology. She is the author, photographer, and designer of best-selling books on gardening, cooking, and preserving.

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7 thoughts on “Winter Aconite

  1. Scary to admit, but I’ve already started my list of bulbs to order for fall (late summer) planting. Eranthis hyemalis is right at the top.

  2. I have both snow drops and winter aconite in the yard. Both came with the house, so i didn’t have to establish anything. However, I did transplant clumps of both into the front and they came up just fine this year. I think however my daffodil bulbs are a dud this year. They might have dried out before I planted in the fall – I haven’t seen even a tip of green.

  3. I just got a clump of this from the yard of Jean Woodhull, a woman who co-founded Cox Arboretum in Dayton, OH. Its a beautiful flower, I love how you can see it sweeping over slopes in the distance through a stand of trees..

  4. Last fall I planted loads of spring flowering bulbs, including both Winter Aconite and Snowdrops. These were the first to bravely bloom after an awful winter – and it made my heart smile to see them. They’re pretty much finished now, but since the daffodils and grape hyacinths have started blooming, it’s been a sweet transition.

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