Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms—Cyclamen Coum and White Flowering Plum (First Week of January 2019)

I've become lazy about keeping track of first blooms in the garden. I think this is because, having taken fairly careful notes, for several years, I've satisfied my original curiosity about the consistency of bloom dates. At first I recorded the first blossoming of virtually every plant in the garden. More recently I've limited by attention to a smaller sampling and missed a few dates I would have liked to have recorded more carefully.

As usual, Cyclamen coum, a dwarf cyclamen variety, was the first flower to bloom in the garden in the new year, several blossoms were already open on the 2nd or 3rd of January, but a single blossom had already opened on December 16--which is quite a bit earlier than every before. Probably an outlier, not part of a trend. Last year this plant bloomed first on January 4. So, aside from the one early bloom, this is in line with its usual pattern.

The white flowering plum on the side of the house began blooming almost a week ago, but I missed the exact date. Probably around January 4. Always pretty, always delightfully fragrant, the bees are already swarming it, probably mostly to collect the abundant pollen. We lost our bees this past summer, so these are bees from hives the neighbors keep. The plum first bloomed last year on January 14, so this is comparatively early, although not unusually so. The tree has had its first flowers as early as December 30 in the past.

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms—Cyclamen Coum, White Flowering Plum

On the first day of 2018, the white Japanese flowering plum in the back yard started to bloom. It has bloomed as early as December 30, but it typically blooms in the middle of January (about now, today being January 14), so the flowers opened somewhat early this year.

On January 4, the first blooms appeared on the delicate dwarf cyclamen we have growing in back of the house under a Japanese maple--Cyclamen coum. The flower stalks stand only about two inches high. This tiny cyclamen typically blooms anywhere from late December to early January, so, that was in line with its usual pattern.

Plants I'm Growing: Outliers (December 25, 2012)

Recently I noticed a couple of plants in the garden blooming earlier than usual. First blooms on the dainty little cyclamen Cyclamen coum under the Japanese maple at the back of the house opened the day before yesterday (December 23). This is usually the first flower to bloom each year. Typically the earliest buds open in the first week of January. They bloomed on December 23 also in 2010 (which I counted as 2011), so this is not unprecedented, but on January 8 in 2009 and January 3 in 2010, so still earlier than usual (photo above).

The white flowering plum (Prunus mume) began blooming on December 21 or so, which is considerably earlier than usual. This plant bloomed on January 4, 2011, January 19, 2010, and January 20, 2009. Perhaps early because of all the rain this year?