All flowers please in one way or another. It’s just that some appeal more than others. If have to choose favourite flowers, invidious I know, it’s a love of rhododendrons. Their colour range from vibrant to subtle is one reason, another is that they’re showy and blousy. While I love daffodils, and their awakening in Spring, for me, being a lazy chap, rhododendrons are evergreen, and get bigger, and therefore showier, over time.
When I lived in the Midlands, in a part that wasn’t ideal growing conditions for them, I created special areas in my garden with ericaceous soil. Some of the rhododendrons I passed on to my parents garden when we moved down here to Lightwater. I visit them when visiting my parents, which gets us to chat about past times. So plants are also vested with personal history.
Back to the reason for this article, it’s because the rhodos and azaleas in our back garden are showing at their best. Being shallow rooted they don’t like long periods of dry weather, so all this rain is good for them, except that it bashes the flowers about.
To see a terrific show of rhodos you need go no further than Earlswood Park adjacent to the Waitrose store on the A30 in Bagshot. I lots of photos of them HERE in 2020, and HERE in 2018.
Meanwhile here’s a photo of rhododendron ‘Purple Passion’, and azalea ‘Koster’s Brilliant Red’, both in our garden.
Lightwater 
you wont be best pleased then – when ESSO’s Pipeline destroys the wild purple chaps along the trackway from The Folly to Blackstroude Lane !
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The wild Ponticum rhodies are invasive weeds, that are being grubbed out in many places.
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