Cyclamen

I noticed last week that the first cyclamen had started to flower in my husband's 'white bed' amid the variegated mint and vinca; the white sweet-smelling dianthus and an alpine whose name I have forgotten that spreads in a mat of silvery leaves.  The cyclamen grew through the naturalised wild strawberry that, still flowering and fruiting, he uses as a filler.  They were variegated also, petals held upward in tones of white and pink making me think of angels' wings on a medieval triptych.

Once we tried cyclamen by our front porch.  We had a big display of them with winter pansies for my sixtieth birthday, sourced from the garden centre of my very distant cousins at Tarleton.  Sadly as is the way with cyclamen, not just theirs I hasten to add, they shrank in following years.  I planted one in a side border without success.  The next batch of 'rescued' cyclamen from a superstore behaved in just the same way.  So, after one year overwintering these at the back of the garden in tubs, my husband moved them to his white bed, where he has also lodged the penstemons he has propagated.   The soil is enriched with our own leaf mould and raised above the water table.  The cyclamen are improving.  I even have hopes of the last translocated survivor from my cousins.  Some plants do better in cultivated ground.