#easterindalston

[easterncurvegarden]

Spring in all its glory has come to Dalston Curve Garden in recent weeks, with fresh leaves unfurling, the delicate beauty of Wild Cherry blossom and new drifts of Spring-flowering bulbs emerging every day. We have been very lucky to have photographers Sandra Keating and Alex Bogdan here to record this beautiful botanical moment in time.

Spring-flowering bulbs make the most of the light beneath the bare stems of deciduous trees before the ground beneath them is shaded out by their new leaves and in recent years we have planted more and more of these plants in our ‘woodland’ style beds. We love dainty Erythronium ‘Pagoda’ which produces little nodding, star-like flowers with sulphur-yellow petals. Their nearby companion Pulmonaria has blue flowers and interesting spotty leaves and is welcomed on warm March and April days by bees searching for nectar.

Everyone at the Curve Garden loves tulips and we plant hundreds more every Autumn!  We don’t plant ours in the ground, as they never look quite right here, but instead we create a glorious display of pots and containers. We’ll be sharing photos of this year’s April display next week, but for now we are shining light on one little early flowering variety. Tulip ‘Turkestanica’ is named, not surprisingly after Turkey, its place of origin. It flowers in March, way ahead of most of our other varieties and is a beautiful wild-looking species, with up to twelve star-shaped flowers.

Visitors to the Curve Garden often ask ‘What Is that blue plant that looks like Bluebells’? The answer is Muscari latifolium (Grape Hyacinth) which we plant in drifts among all the yellow Narcissi (Daffodils) and best of all, the bees love them! 

We are in love with Leucojum aestivum the wonderfully but rather confusingly named ‘Summer Snowflake’ which flowers in Spring!  A member of the Daffodil family, it has dainty white bells with green ‘dots’. We grow the variety ‘Gravetye Giant’ and this year we planted it in locations all over the garden. 

Spring really is all about Daffodils or Narcissi and we grow about seven varieties here, some directly in the soil and others in pots and tins, aiming to get successional flowering from February to late April. Our favourites include dainty little ‘Hawera’ which we’ve combined with Summer Snowflakes under trees, the delicately scented ‘Pipit’ and for the first time this year ‘Thalia’ which has a long flowering period and is great for vases.  

Thanks to Gardener Emma Rey and to all of our volunteers for their hard work from September to December last year planting all of these beautiful bulbs! And we are also grateful to volunteer Eco Zhang for her lovely hand-painted signs identifying our plants that are of special interest now.  

The Garden is open from 11am every day over the Easter weekend and til 10pm Friday - Sunday so why not come in and enjoy the botanical abundance?

All photographs copyright of Dalston Eastern Curve Garden