That golden yellow disk, gradually sinking to the horizon, surrounded by a deep orange sky with scattered darkening clouds. It’s still freezing outside, but there’s a promise of warmer days and balmy evenings to come.

One of the cleared areas is under the choisya (Mexican Orange Blossom). The large choysia provides a year-round shady area underneath that’s packed full of plants such as hostas, ivy, fern, lupins and foxgloves that love the cover it provides.

However, it is looking very bare at the moment, but this whole area will be burgeoning with plants come early summer. It is one of my favourite little corners of the garden. I’ll have to remember to rescue the Campanula runners that are right in the middle of a patch of hosta (currently resting underground), which itself is a pretty large so I will split the crown and get several good-sized plants from it – which reminds me, there is another hosta that also needs splitting but I need to prepare the area where the extra plants will go before I can do that, which means getting more compost in as I’ve run out…

This is how to-do lists on fax rolls were invented.

When I look at this picture, I see the obvious vivid yellow bud of the daffodil. It’s not closed, but is just beginning to open and I think that’s the crux of it. It’s the anticipation of the flower that this will open into. It’s what the opening bud will become. I know it will form a beautiful flower with a wonderful fragrance. At the moment though, it is just a bud, but it seems that if I watch the picture for long enough, I’ll see it slowly open into flower.

Although we have a few plants in flower at the moment, the daffodils are the first big vibrant blooms of the year and although it is barely February at the moment and still cold, they’re a sign that the garden is very gradually beginning to wake up.

It’s a tease watching it open – the buds seem to unfold so slowly and I get impatient waiting, but then one day all of a sudden, you’ll be faced with a quartet of large beautiful bell-shaped flowers.

It has done this almost every week for the last month and I’m going to have some strong words about it and tell someone to pull their finger out.

Bright green may work on most glossy evergreen plants, but definitely not on Cineraria “Silver Leaf”. I left it on there as the thick velvet leaves of this plant are not going to make a lovely dinner. A bird is likely not to be as sparing as I was and so nature carries on.

I shall cherish the time I can potter about with other things, sit back and relax a little and not have to worry about getting things done in the garden, which will inevitably be the case in a few month’s time when the weather starts to warm up.

The heads of delicate white flowers look beautiful but it’s the silver stripe running down the middle of each petal that make them look like stars. This is one that I would really love to have but I just couldn’t bring myself to subject this tropical plant to the UK climate, even indoors.

I bought it in the summer (on the cheap), planted it and subsequently ignored it. I did notice that it had recently started flowering, but like the shrub itself, the flowers are also not really anything to paint pictures for. They’re OK, and it’s nice that they flower in the winter when everything else is sleeping but they just don’t grab your attention.

However, what does grab your attention and make you stop in your tracks to sniff the air isn’t obvious from the picture – it’s the incredible heady sweet fragrance that these tiny flowers are pumping out. This perfume factory is only small, yet I (with my really bad sense of smell) managed to smell it from a few metres away on a cold morning when I wasn’t even looking out for it.

It is such a gorgeous perfume that I sometimes just sniff around in the air trying to find drifting pockets of fragrance. It’s just what you need while rushing from the front door to the car to get off to work in the mornings. I shall definitely be trying to propagate this plant. The flowers produce shiny black berries that contain a seed each. I’ve read that the seed will readily germinate so I’m going to collect and sow as many as I can and dot this shrub around the garden. Just imagine how amazing several of these shrubs together would smell.

Depending on how generous I’m feeling, I’m likely to give some away to friends and family once the seedlings have grown into well-established plants. The tip is to keep them moist and keep them in the shade, away from strong harsh sunlight. I did this by having hollyhocks growing over the top of it in the summer.

This tiny little shrub has become one of the stars in the garden and I can’t wait to have more of them.