Imagine coming around the corner and seeing this magnolia tree in full bloom! In early March! It is a Magnolia ‘Caerhays Belle’, apparently a cross between M. sargentiana var. robusta and M. sprenger ‘Diva’. Oregon State University’s Landscape Plants says the cross was developed at Caerhays Castle, Cornwall, England, and introduced into North America in 1972. This particular tree was planted in 1999.

So I went looking. Caerhays Estate has a lovely website flush with photographs of trees in blossom, including a Magnolia ‘Caerhays Belle’ that is a hundred years old (https://visit.caerhays.co.uk/the-estate/the-gardens/). The website also has a Caerhays Garden Diary dating back to 1897 and kept by four generations of Chelsea Flower Show competitors, hybridizers, and recipients of “Chinese species of rhododendrons, camellias, magnolias and other ornamental trees and shrubs which were then unknown in Western Europe” (https://thediary.caerhays.co.uk/contributors-to-the-garden-diary/).  From the spreadsheet listing their National Collection of Magnolias, I learned that ‘Caerhays Belle’ was bred in 1951 by Caerhays Esate’s head gardener, Charles Michael,  and it took 14 years to flower.

Two evergreen Armand clematis vines are now flowering, one with yellow flowers and one with white. What look like petals are actually sepals and are showy to attract pollinators.

These plants like their roots cool and their heads warm, have trifoliate leaves, and grow seedheads that are sometimes called Old Man’s Beards. These vines benefit from pruning after flowering (unless you are collecting their seeds) and initially appreciate being supported .

The earliest dogwood to bloom is Cornus mas, commonly known as cornelian cherry dogwood because of its red fruit that look like–you guessed it–cherries. This tree has been hinting at blooming for a few weeks, but its buds have finally opened to reveal yellow inflorescences made spiky by a myriad of stamens.

We have a male and a female katsura on my street, opposite each other, which allows for the pollen on the male flowers to waft across the street to the female flowers.

The female katsura tree is quite tall so the flowers are too high to photograph. The male is young, capable of growing pollen-laden male flowers, and a comfortable height to be photographed.

Lastly comes buttercup winterhazel, Corylopsis pauciflora, a most unusual multi-stemmed treelike shrub to have in a small garden, because it is in full bloom in March, like Cornus mas.

It could be called a precocious plant, where precocious is a botanical term used when the flowers emerge before the leaves.

The pale yellow flowers, about 1 cm in length, have very delicate petals and sepals, as you can see from this close-up of an inflorescence of about five hanging flowers. The plant is in Hamamelidaceae, the witch hazel family.