Butterflies fill the Tropical Zone in the Glasshouse until 24 February. Come and enjoy our plant displays too, ranging from dry temperate cacti to bird-like strelitzias and wide-leaved bananas, with flowers in all colours, shapes and sizes to admire in all parts of the Glasshouse.
Edgeworthia chrysantha and Clematis cirrhosa are a couple of plants that bloom this month, and you can find both of them in the beds around the Laboratory building. Early flowering cherry trees offer delicate blossoms around the garden - look out for their attractive bark too.
For a couple of weeks in February crocuses produce a sea of pale purple flowers, particularly pretty when the low winter sun is shining through. Crocus tommasinianus is great for naturalizing in this way as it increases freely by seed and offsets. Look out for them on the Alpine Meadow, plus multicoloured crocuses by the Bowes-Lyon Pavilion and on the bank by The Pines.
Pretty pink, purple and white Cyclamen coum carpet the ground in the Rock Garden, Battleston Hill and other pockets of space in the garden where its leaves alone can be attractive. This hardy species is ideal on a leafy bank, under trees or shrubs, in rock gardens, or beneath sheltered walls. It looks best planted in drifts.
Hellebores, with their dissected foliage and cup-shaped flowers, are at their best in February. Yellow, cream, pink, even dark purple to almost black, some spotted, some striped – they come in a wide variety of colours. Find them in many areas including Battleston Hill and the Wild Garden. Around the Rock Garden, Helleborus x hybridus (hybrid Lenten rose) is among the most beautiful.
Down on the Trials Field this month some of the earliest flowering cultivars in the Rosewarne collection of daffodils are out (the first was out in January) and they’ll continue until April. You can spot daffodils emerging all over the garden – look out for them on Seven Acres, the Wild Garden, Rock Garden and Jubilee Arboretum Including Narcissus ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’ and N. ‘February Gold’.
You will be led by the nose to some amazing shrubs from the moment you walk through the gates and pass winter flowering honeysuckles. Other late winter flowering shrubs such as Sarcococca and Hamamelis and highly scented Daphne are giving a good show, both with flower and fragrance. Camellias bloom alongside them, especially in the more sheltered areas of the garden like Battleston Hill and the Wild Garden.
Small green shoots push up through the soil and reveal their sparkling white flowers. Snowdrops are in abundance at Wisley, especially around the Rock Garden and Wild Garden. In the Alpine House you can see these little gems, and numerous other flowers, close up.