It’s been said that spring is coloured by flowers, while the colour of winter is only in the imagination.

Not so for intrepid botanists who discovered 532 species of wildflowers in bloom across Britain and Ireland around New Year’s Day.

According to the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI), which organises the annual New Year Plant Hunt, this rainbow of midwinter colour is a far cry from botanical textbooks of several decades ago which indicated only a few dozen species should be blooming in midwinter.

This unexpected blooming included robust favourites such as daisies, dandelions, groundsel and gorse, but also “autumn stragglers” including ragwort, hogweed and yarrow, which normally flower after midsummer but well before midwinter.

Botanists suggest that climate change bringing milder early winters may be a factor in the January colour, but so too is an increased search effort and the sharing of pictures on social media, as well as a burgeoning number of non-native flowers that have escaped into the wild. Nearly half – 46% – of the midwinter blooms were non-native.



“If you believe the textbooks, only about 10% of the species we found in flower should be in flower,” said Dr Kevin Walker, BSBI’s Head of Science. “It could be climate change but it could also be because people didn’t used to go and look for flowers in midwinter.”

According to Walker, urban areas tend to have more non-native flowering species than rural areas, with cities and towns providing more sheltered places with warm microclimates where plants that have escaped from gardens can thrive.

Perhaps reassuring for lovers of a traditionally bleak winter, the 2018 tally was significantly lower than the 611 flowers recorded during the exceptionally mild winter of 2016.

And there was no sign that the floral riches herald an early spring: only 14% of the species recorded were springtime specialists such as primrose and lesser celandine.

“We’re not finding plants flowering earlier, we’re finding things are flowering later or just straggling on because the milder early winter is not killing them off with frosts,” said Walker.



More than 1,000 people – a record number – participated in the plant hunt from Caithness to Guernsey, with pictures shared on social media, including BSBI’s increasingly popular “wildflower hour” on Twitter on Sunday evenings.

The most floral place in Britain and Ireland during this bleak midwinter was Phillack in Cornwall, which boasted 114 different species in flower.