An early start for Lesser Celandines

 Almost as soon as the snow melted rosettes of marbled, spoon-shaped leaves of lesser celandine  Ficaria verna have unfurled and lie flat against the soil, intercepting every available photon of weak January sunshine.

Every year, this ambitious wild flower appears somewhere new in our garden. The particular form that grows here is subspecies bulbifera, which reproduces via detachable buds called bulbils, about the size of a rice grain, that form in leaf stalk bases. By early summer the celandines will have withered, leaving these propagules on the soil surface, dormant until spring. Then they quickly produce deep roots and new leaves and, where there was one plant, there will be many cloned copies of their parent.

Lifting them reveals the haemorrhoid-shaped underground tubers which, in accordance with the ancient doctrine of signatures indicated its medicinal virtues and conferred its apothecary’s name, pilewort. “Bathed with the juice mixed with wine or with the sick man’s urine, [piles] are drawn together and dried up, and the pain quite taken away,” wrote John Gerard , the The Herbal in 1597..

For years, I’ve inadvertently transported bulbils around in mud on my boots. To a pernickety gardener, this proliferation of pilewort might seem a pain in the bum, but my aching back knows that there’s now no hope of digging it all out; nor would I want to. I like the idea of its starry yellow flowers blooming in my footsteps, providing pollen and nectar for tawny mining bees, bee flies and the first butterflies emerging from hibernation in spring. 

Hungry rook

 Fields here have been blanketed with snow, and the ground frozen rock-hard, for four days now, so these are tough times for birds like rooks, that normally feed on soil invertebrates. This one has been visiting the garden every day, using that pick-axe beak to hack away at balls of dough, fat and cheese. It's very cautious in this confined space, surrounded by hedges and trees, which isn't perhaps surprising for a bird that normally feeds in wide open spaces with a clear field of view. It never hangs around for very long.

When sunlight glances off those black feathers they have a lovely green iridescence.

Winter fragrance

I cut this winter heliotrope Petasites pyrenaicum (syn. L. fragrans) flower from the garden just before the snow arrived. Despite being native to the Mediterranean region it is very hardy in Britain, where it's widely naturalised, and produces new foliage and flowers in winter. The flowers have a delightful scent of vanilla, or maybe marzipan, depending on your sense of smell. Only female plants have ever been introduced so it never sets seed, but the creeping rhizomes can be very invasive so its root growth needs to be confined. Its widespread occurrence on road verges is most likely the result of fly-tipping of garden waste, by people who planted it in open ground and wish they hadn't.

Winter honeysuckle Lonicera fragrantissima is native to China and has a wonderfully intense fragrance during the day, unlike our native honeysuckle whose scent only develops at dusk, to attract crepuscular pollinators like hawk moths. This particular specimen is planted in a front garden in Durham city and scents the air for passers-by.