I have no pictures for the rest of this, but it's celebratory. Cheers and hurrah! Nothing like seeing growth on plants you thought were dead, or plants that had no right to be living. So here's what I'm celebrating:
My fig survived being chewed on by deer and rabbits. It is not what it was last year, when it clearly had a good life ahead of it, but if it grows at the same rate this year, it will equal its last-year-self in size, and I will fence it in September before the deer start breaking rules and the rabbits get sneaky.
My pomegranate is alive! So far it has about five leaves, but I hope they will keep popping out. I was quite sure it had not survived its first winter planted outside, despite being wrapped around by fencing and row cover and heavily mulched, and despite this being the mildest winter ever, but a few days ago I saw the first leaf... and then remembered that in previous years when I took it inside in its pot each winter, it dropped all the leaves and did not start leafing out again until May. So it's right on schedule (I just expect everything to be early this year).
I also have poppies that I thought were dead coming back to life on the maple tree knoll, and most of what I planted on the back slope is returning. And all my new little trees are fine, though the holly I transplanted from out front lost its top half and will be shrubby rather than tree-y.
I have the strong possibility of a new Carolina allspice (I have one already, about fifteen years old, but I planted it prematurely as part of the native-understory-shrubs row that is only now coming into being, and it has survived having Christmas trees dumped on it and branches falling on it and general neglect, but it is not one of those allspices that smells like it should, due to nature not nurture, so I don't feel guilty. About that). The new one is thanks to a fellow MG who needed suckers dug out - I came home with two, and the first one I planted does not look too good, but the one still in the pot looks fine.
And back in late "winter" when I hurriedly pruned the Limelight hydrangeas in anticipation of Verizon needing access to the side of the house, and threw the clippings on the ground where they sat for a month before I got around to picking them up, I really didn't think I'd get four new hydrangeas out of it, but when I cleaned up I found that four of the trimmings had grown leaves (they were lying on damp ground, but not in any way treated like a cutting one would wish to have grow), and I stuck them in the ground over on the maple knoll, and all of them are still alive. At some point I will have to move them elsewhere, but right now I am just enjoying the little miracle.
Along with the plants I snagged at the MG plant swap this week, I picked up a bag of bulbs of resurrection lilies, a.k.a. naked ladies, the amaryllis relatives that put out leaves in the spring and then pink flowers on naked stalks in the fall. The accompanying instructions said (and I'm sure this is right) that they should be planted in the fall. I thought about this, and about the times I've tried to store bulbs over the humid summer to find them mushy or sprouting, and decided to experiment. Half of them went in the ground today, and the others went in a paper bag that I will try to keep somewhere fairly dry. Let's see what happens.
Positive thinking helps me not wallow in the wheelbarrowfuls of weeds I still have to pull and all the other stuff that will die if I don't get to it. Oh, the looming disaster.
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