February brings out the cherry plum Prunus cerasifera; and as its the first to blossom in the hedgerows on the North Downs it always gets a mention. But it’s not a native species but introduced from Central Asia and the Balkans and cultivated from the 16th century; hence its other more exotic name of myrobalan plum. As with other Prunus species, the brilliant white flowers come out before the leaves.

Blackthorn Prunus spinosa has almost identical flowers but appears about a month later and is always meant to coincide with a spell of cold weather or the ‘Blackthorn winter’. This used to be April but now in our warming climate it is March. A recent paper demonstrates that this trend in earlier flowering in a wide range of tree, shrub and herb species only commenced in the 1980s with no discernible trends before then; this was based on ‘first flowering date’ data that runs all the way back to 1753.