January is a Big Month on The Lizard

Start the New Year with Daffodils.

It is always surprising how quickly the days begin to get lighter through January and then everything begins to wake up to another year.

The daffodil pickers have begun their annual challenge on The Lizard and we have daily lorry loads of daffodils heading up to London from the Helford. In the late 1940s and 1950s Trelowarren used to pack and send Hydrangeas to Covent Garden and from time to time we grow daffs here too.

A hard working Cornish daff picker can pick, trim and bind up to 8000 daffodil stems a day – so over 10 weeks that’s as many as half a million daffodils per picker. Multiply than one out and you have 25 million daffodils around the UK each year and all of them hand picked from one farm on the Lizard. Think of the Lizard as you go out to buy your flowers and support daffodils this year.

The good thing for us on the Lizard, is the number of varieties found in the hedgerows, the Cornish walls and on the verges.  It makes a wonderful colourful drive where ever you go around West Cornwall.  There is also the opportunity to purchase big bags of bulbs from the roadside stalls a little later in the spring.  The commercial growers will replace the bulbs every 4 years, the bulbs they pull up are sold to parks and gardens throughout the country.

Check out the flower counts on Tresco, and at Trewithen and . Already Cornish gardens have hundreds of plants in flower and here at Trelowarren we are overwhelmed, in the nicest possible way, by the incredible scent of the winter flowering box.