Welcome to this week’s ‘In A Vase On Monday’ when I am linking up with Cathy from Rambling In The Garden with a vase of flowers picked from my garden this morning.

This week I have chosen to showcase a few more camellia flowers. Their season is so short and their flowers so anticipated that I need to make the most of their beauty whilst they are available. Last week I used the beautiful pink bloom of Debbie. This week it is the turn of white and pale lemon flowers.

Camellias in a Vase

I have been buying camellias for a few years now and have amassed a small collection – all grown in pots of ericaceous compost against a front wall of the house. Sadly I have lost the name tags of my earlier specimens (a house move and a puppy made sure that my labels are a thing of the past). My choices this week are, I believe, Camellia japonica “Margaret Davis’ and Camellia x williamsii ‘Jury’s Yellow’. If anyone has any other views, please do let me know.

Camellia x williamsii Jury's Yellow

The delicate narcissi that I have used to compliment the pale yellow of Jury’s Yellow are recently planted narcissus pseudonarcissus, also known as the wild British daffodil. These are the blooms that Wordsworth spoke of in his most famous poem ‘Daffodils’ and they have just opened up in my garden.

Camellia japonica Margaret Davis

This is the first year that I have cut camellia flowers for the house, always believing them unsuitable for a vase before now. Actually they cut very nicely – growing on woody stems with evergreen leaves they need little support from other flowers. They last for a few days in a vase, but the flower head will drop off at some point so they do not fade gracefully.

Narcissi pseudonarcissus

The book that you can see in some of these photos is ‘My Garden In Spring’ by E.A. Bowles. First published in 1914, my version is a reprint published by Forgotten Books in 2012. I have just started reading this and it is a delight. There are no colour photographs, but the language of the text more than makes up for that. To quote from the preface “Come into Mr Bowles’s garden and learn what true gardening is, and what is the real beauty of plants, and what the nature of their display.” I am three chapters in and the book is certainly living up to this description.

Chapter One is titled “When Does Spring Commence’ and is a discussion of various views on when spring really starts. For me it is when the camellias come into flower. The snowdrops and the iris belong in my eyes to the winter. I know that when the fat buds of my camellias spill out into beautiful full petalled flowers we really have reached the beginning of spring.

Camellias

I hope you have enjoyed ‘In A Vase On Monday’ today and I will be back later in the week with my promised review of the day I spent at an Emily Quinton photography workshop. In the meantime I am trying to post more day to day gardening photos on my Instagram feed, so please do join me there.

If you were here last week you will remember that I used anemones and a camellia flower in the three bottles that I placed in a bathroom. The camellia flower only lasted two days before losing her head, but the anemones looked good for a full five days. This weeks vases have been placed on my kitchen windowsill which is warm and sunny, so I will let you know how they long they last.

I hope you will pop over to Cathy’s blog to have a look at what she and the others have found in their gardens this week.