Hello and welcome to the award-winning BBC Gardner's World magazine podcast, brought to you by the team here at the magazine.

Join us as we chat all things gardening with the nation's favourite experts.

Hello, I'm Kevin. I'm the content director at Gardner's World magazine. It's a pleasure to see you all. I hope you're having a lovely day so far. We're going to be having a chat with a wonderful Francis Hoppil. So come on, let's give her a really good Gardner's World welcome. Out you come, Francis. Come and have a seat.

Hello. Hello.

Let's let's have a sit down, shall we?

Have you had a good morning so far?

Are you enjoying the show?

It's really nice and I think the weather is really nice,

apart from that wind.

So we've got half an hour or so

and we are going to have a really good chat about spring flowering bulbs.

Why do you like and love them so much? I think as all gardeners, I don't know if this may be universal,

it may just be me, but when you first see the bulbs coming up in the winter, it gives you that

little bit of hope that spring is coming.

And for me, the kind of end of the winter is the hardest part of it,

because the buildup you're looking forward to Christmas, there's the solstice,

it's sort of you've got the autumn colour still.

It's novel.

You can still enjoy blackberry picking and making blackberry and apple crumble and putting the fire on. But by February, it's all worn, a bit thin. And you just want it to stop raining and you want the days to get longer and you want to be able to get out there more. And then suddenly you see a daffodil or a snowdrop. And that is just the shift. It's when you begin to do the buildup and I love spring. And so for me like spring bulbs, they kind of mark different points of spring. You start with the snowdrops and you have the crocus and you have the daffodil. You know, then you go into the kind of blue bells and everything starts off yellow. Then it goes blue. And then by the end of that, you're in summer and you have all the different colours.

And bulbs just represent that transition for me.

And it's a lifeline by the end of winter.

The pathway to summer is kind of what you're describing there.

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