The Primrose Trail

A couple of weeks ago I did an impulse buy of a tray of pale yellow flowers, which were displayed outside a garden centre.  Before you ask they were NOT daffodils. 

"Ok!" I thought to myself, "These will look rather nice underneath the trees at the bottom of the garden. If they like it there, they may even naturalise, along with the cyclamen and the foxgloves..."

I even managed to plant them before the cold weather set in - though not in the place I originally intended. When I came to plant them I thought, 

"These will add some lovely colour to the garden, but it is a pity to have them so far away," and so their new home was the rockery adjacent to the pond... where the pheasant can keep an eye on them 

Now six small plants in a winter-bare garden do not make much of an impact, especially when you plant them both sides of a rockery.  

Then I had a brainwave.

"I will buy some more!" 

And so it came to be that we set off on The Great Primrose Hunt!

We started in a garden centre the other side of Worcester. Now the sparsely filled displays in the plant section bore testimony that February is not the most popular time for purchasing plants. Who in their right mind wants to go digging holes in the permafrost? However, there was a good variety of plants of the primula family in a wide variety of colours, but they only had a few pale yellow. I succombed to a pot of pale blue bulbs. Before you ask, they were not daffodils, either!

Later,  as we were heading home, we did an impulse stop at another garden centre, which we had often passed, but never stopped at before. Again, plenty of pink, blue, burgundy, orange, you-name -it colours. Disappointingly, there were not a lot of primrosey looking primulas.

Finally we crossed the county boundary, visiting my favourite local garden centre. Here we discovered a wondrous vista of primulas in every shade imaginable stretched out before us. Surely THIS will be the place where we will find our primrosey looking primulas! Alas, the pale yellow ones had orange centres, so we discounted them...  

We returned home and admired the previously purchased primulas, only to notice to our horror, that they too had orange centres, just like the ones we had spurned!  We really should have taken a photo before we went - it really would have made life a lot simpler.

However, the trail hasn't gone cold. We have three options:-

A) We could return to the garden centre where we made our original purchases and buy some additional plants, providing they still have some in stock. 

B) Return to a garden centre or two WITH A PHOTO on my phone and identify the ones that match most closely to the plants purchased previously.

C) Buy some that look similar but don't have the orange centres, and ignore the fact that they are not all the same.

Who knew buying plants would be like a box of chocolates and we would want to avoid the ones with the orange centres...