A big hello from The Green Owl. Truly excited with the fact that we celebrated our first anniversary on Valentine's Day. We are still in the crawling stage at the moment hoping to gain strength day by day.

Longer days, clearer skies…..aaaah….finally the last of the cold winter months are slowly giving way to warmer days. I can actually see the plants heave a sigh of relief as they wake up from dormancy. 

 

This has been quite a long cold winter but like everything else in life, we truly must learn to appreciate the seasons and how beautifully they change giving  us all so much to look forward to. 

 

Most gardeners are now busy planting the best flowers for this season - the Spring. 

How lucky we are in this part of the world to have such a huge variety of flowers to plant and grow. This is the time you can really make your garden bloom with almost every colour imaginable. 

 

What plans do you have for your garden this Spring?  Have you prune your roses and your trees? If you haven’t then this is the right time to do it, just around the time new growth begins. 

 

Here are some beautiful seasonal flowers that you can start with.

 

The fancy Pansy flowers with cute little angry “faces” love the cool weather and they come with the widest range of colours and patterns. I love to grow them together as containers to truly enjoy their beauty as they all start to flower at once. It feels like so many faces are looking back at you. 

Add to this the fact that you eat this flower in salads and desserts. 

 

My other favourite flower for this season is the gorgeous Gazania. Fondly called treasure flowers, these are South African flowering plants belonging to the daisy family and it gets its common name from the fifteenth-century Greek-Italian philosopher, Theodorus of Gaza. These beauties thrive in full sun so be sure to place them properly when you plant them. 

 

Pretty Petunia, now how can one ever get tired of these papery thin bright and beautiful blooms. You can get them in single blooms or double and in such a variety of colours and patterns I am truly at a loss when It comes to selecting a few. Growing petunias is easy and rewarding and once you do get the hang of doing this well, your garden will never be a dull place again. 

 

Dainty daisies, one of the most popular garden flowers to grow in the springtime. This plant likes sun with afternoon shade, prefers cool temperatures, as well as cool, moist, fertile soil. The flower buds, petals and leaves are all edible raw and can be made into a tea. They have also been used in homoeopathy and as a herbal remedy for healing wounds, liver disorders and treating mouth ulcers. 

 

Perky Poppies, there is the obsession of honeybees that zone into the centre of the flower to sample their golden crown of pollen. Look how gorgeous they are with their thin papery blooms. If you want to encourage more flowers you need to deadhead the old blooms. Some prefer to let the flowers stay on the plant for as long as they can to get the seeds to set. Once this happens the seeds will scatter around the garden naturally and soon enough there will be plenty of small poppy plants popping up here and there. 

 

If I were to squeeze in one more seasonal flower here it would have to be the glamorous Gerbera daisy. These blooms are so stunning sometimes it makes you wonder if they are for real. They thrive best under bright light but do not like intense heat so do keep that in mind. Like many flowers that are repeat bloomers , regular pruning and deadheading is a must. Gerbera daisies are really very easy to grow whether indoors or out and the best part is that they come back every year - enough reasons to make them a part of your garden. 

 

We have the whole of Spring to look forward to and I’ve just covered a handful of the seasonal flowers here. If you have more space in your garden you could add a few more to the list like Verbena, Anthuriums, Lantanas, Calendulas, Cinerarias, Cornflowers and Carnations. They all bring with them a rich variety of colours and blooms, each one so unique and beautiful. 

 

Wishing you an extremely green colourful Spring season ahead. Happy gardening folks.