Winter Aconite (Eranthis hyemalis)

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, since I wrote this I have had yet another attempt to grow winter aconites in the garden, and yet again not a sausage. Could it be the squirrels? I know they love crocuses but these corms are very different. Or maybe it’s the clay soil, though I am mulching and trying to improve it a bit every year. Unlike tulips or daffodils, there are few cultivars, but I rather like the one in the photo below, with its pale apricot flowers.

But it’s the idea of a carpet of yellow winter aconites, white snowdrops and maybe pale pink cyclamen coum that really floats my boat. Maybe I’ll have to give it another go.

And now, let’s see what else I’ve found out about winter aconite…

Winter Aconite var Schwefelglanz Photohttps://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/258248/eranthis-hyemalis-schwefelglanz/details

Dear Readers, how I love winter aconites! Their butter-yellow flowers above the Tudor ruff of leaves always cheers me up. Alas, as my original Wednesday Weed post from 2017 shows, I have not had a lot of success in growing them in the garden, but nonetheless they are often found in cemeteries and churchyards, naturalising amongst the snowdrops in a delicious way.

In her piece on the plant, Rowan Jaines points out how the winter aconite was really popularised by Capability Brown, who planted great swathes of the plant in his landscape designs, so that there was something bright to look at all year round. You can see some flowering through the snow at Compton Verney, where the gardens were designed by Capability Brown, or at Audley End. Interestingly, Jaines mentions how although winter aconite originally came from France and Central Europe back in the late 15th Century it, like the snowdrop, have become regarded as an essential part of England, incorporated into our whole idea of what an early spring English garden should look like. We sometimes forget, I think, how managed and human-influenced practically everything in this country is, with nowhere that has been untouched by human hand.

Winter aconite has been through a fine list of name-changes. First known as winter wolfsbane, because its leaves and seeds were thought to resemble those of the poisonous wolfsbane (better known to us as monkshood), it was then thought to be a hellebore, and finally became a winter aconite after Richard Salisbury, an unorthodox botanist who spent most of his career arguing with Linnaeus about his plant classification, named it Eranthis hyemalis in 1807. The name was only accepted by the botanical community sixty years later.

Incidentally, the name Eranthis hyemalis is a kind of Latin/Greek mash-up, meaning literally ‘spring-flowering winter flower’. Confusion reigns!

And now, let’s pop back to 2017 when I did my original blog on the plant. Don’t miss the poem at the end.

Dear Readers, last year I decided to finally get my act together and plant some woodland bulbs. With the help of my husband I planted snowdrops and cyclamen, lily of the valley and bluebells, and some winter aconite. I had been hoping for a carpet of spring colour. Instead, I have exactly two winter aconites, and a small early crop of stinging nettles. Whether the squirrels have had the lot or they’re just late is anybody’s guess. So I was particularly pleased to spot this fine collection of yellow beauties in a church yard in Camden, not far from Regent’s Park.

Winter aconites are a member of the buttercup family, but they always remind me of tiny saffron waterlilies. In Suffolk (where they seem to be particularly abundant) they are known as ‘choirboys’ because the ruff of leaves rather resembles the neckline of a choirboy’s costume.  The plant came originally from southern Europe and was apparently first introduced to the UK in 1596. By 1838 they were recorded in the wild, and are now seen in churchyards and verges, usually close to human habitation. However, there is a legend that winter aconites only grow where the blood of Roman soldiers was spilled, which implies that either the plants are time-travellers, or they were here a lot earlier than their documented first appearance. This Roman connection was a source of inspiration for the crime novelist Dorothy L.Sayers, who moved close to a Roman camp at Bluntisham, near Cambridge when she was a little girl, and was delighted by the winter aconites. When her father told her the story, her interest in ancient Rome was triggered. Although better known for her Sir Peter Wimsey detective novels, she became something of a classicist, and would explore this in her non-fiction work ‘The Lost Tools of Learning’, which advocated a return to the skills of logic, grammar and rhetoric. I can’t help wondering if, with the current level of political argument, she might have had a point.

Winter aconites are not actually members of the Aconite family but on the ever-informative Poison Garden website, John Robertson explains that the leaves look like those of the true aconites. This might also be why the plant has a reputation for being poisonous: all buttercups are poisonous to a degree, but true aconites, such as Monkshood (Aconitum napellus) are among the most toxic plants in the garden. I have only been able to find two documented cases of death through winter aconite poisoning, The first was an elderly German dachshund with a history of plant ingestion. The other is from the Plant Lives website, and mentions the death, in 1822, of the unfortunate Mrs Gorst, who is said to have  harvested winter aconite tubers after mistaking them for horseradish. Suffice it to say that eating decorative garden plants is never a great idea for any creature, human or otherwise.

As one of the earliest flowering of all  bulbs, winter aconite is a real boon in a woodland garden (or would be if it actually grew). They are known as spring ephemerals, because they take advantage of the light that filters through to the forest floor before the foliage appears on the trees, and disappear later in the year. In this, they mimic their close relative, the lesser celandine. Even snow does not deter the winter aconite. For the rest of the year, the plant hides beneath the leaf litter as a bulb, waiting for its moment of glory when everything else is still dormant.

Winter aconite has inspired a number of artists, including Sir Stanley Spencer, more famous for his figurative paintings involving his home village of Cookham. Here is a painting that he made on commission for the wife of the local vicar, the Reverend Canon Westropp. It was sold at Bonhams in 2013 for £51,650, and I suspect that this might have been a bargain. Spencer had always made studies of local flora to include in his landscape paintings, but the floral paintings were small and sold well. Spencer worked on some of these paintings between his more famous works, and seems to have taken a great deal of care over them: he commented that one of his plant pictures, ‘Magnolias’, was ‘as good as anything that I’ve ever done’. There is certainly a lot of love in ‘Winter Aconites’, painted in 1957, towards the end of Spencer’s life (he died in 1959).

Winter Aconite by Stanley Spencer (Photo One – credit below)

And I would like to finish with a poem, because that’s always a good way to finish in my experience. The poet Freda Downie, who died in 1993, was born in Shooter’s Hill, evacuated to Northamptonshire, returned to London in time for the Blitz, left when it finished and with impeccable timing was brought back to London in time for the V1 and V2 rockets. I love her poem Aconites, which feels just right for this time of the year, and even mentions a blackbird.

“Winter holds fast,
But a little warmth escapes like sand
Through the closed fingers.
The error is annual and certain,
Letting the pygmy flowers
Make their prompt appearance
Under creaking trees.
They stand with serious faces, green ruffled,
As prim as Tudor portraits.


In the west
The greys and gleam slide in the wind
And only the descended blackbird
Augments the intrepid yellow.”

Photo Credits

Photo One (Winter Aconites by Stanley Spencer) https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/20776/lot/69/

Freda Downie’s poem was published on the Greentapestry website here

All other blog content free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!