By Danelle Cutting
For the Salisbury Post

Nothing says spring like spring flowering bulbs. After a cold, damp winter everyone is ready for some warmer weather and beautiful flowers to signal the end of winter. Luckily, you do not have to go far to see some of that beauty — it can be found right here at Hurley Park.

Hurley Park usually has something of interest throughout all of the seasons but it seems we get the bulk of our praises during the spring when all of our spring bulbs are blooming. Every year, Hurley Park plants tulips in what we call our entrance garden that is on the corner of Annandale Avenue and Lake Drive. We also showcase unique themes and colors in our garden beds each year. We cannot wait to see what this year’s display will look like and we know our guests will love it too.

Until the tulips start blooming, Hurley Park has already started to have some other spring bulbs blooming and coming up. Croci are starting to bloom in the park now and it has been wonderful seeing the bright yellow and purple blooms scattered throughout the park. We even have some Grape Hyacinths (Muscari spp.) coming up and will be blooming in the next few weeks.

Our most spectacular display is still our daffodil bed in the Koontz-Walser garden located directly behind the large gazebo on Annandale Avenue. This bed has over 2,000 daffodils with mixed cultivars of Fortune, Ice Follies, Carlton and Tete a Tete at the beginning of the bed. The leaves are starting to come up and it will not be long before we get our large bed of sunshine to start blooming. What is truly nice about this bed is that we will have the large amount of daffodils in the spring and then in the summer the daffodils give way to our day lilies.

We have a few other plantings that are blooming right now, one of my favorites is the witch-hazel. Another gorgeous specimen is our lenten roses or hellebores are also blooming which makes this cold weather more enjoyable.

We love visitors coming to the park and enjoying our beautiful scenery so plan a time to visit. We encourage people to leave the flowers alone and not pick them so that all of our visitors get to enjoy in the beauty. We also request that no one trample the flowers to take photos inside of the garden beds because it causes destruction of the plants and can cause issues in the future with compaction. We thank all of our patrons for protecting and watching over the park. We could not do it without you all.

Be sure to come visit Hurley Park soon so you will not miss our spring display. If you have any questions about the park or what is going on, please give us a call at 704-638-4459 or contact us on Facebook or Instagram @HurleyParkNC. If you would like to donate to Hurley Park, visit our website at salisburync.gov/hurleypark.

Danelle Cutting is manager of Hurley Park.