Showing off the pepper seedlings

The Grow It Eat It blog really doesn't need me spamming about my seed-starting operations any more this year, so I thought I'd just post a photo of my huge and lovely peppers here instead.

They really want to go outside, but even hardening off is not going to start for another week or so. But aren't they pretty? I'd forgotten what it's like to have non-stunted peppers from which I am not constantly washing aphids. (Two years, two accidental introductions, long story. Nothing that goes outside comes back to my seed-starting room anymore, ever.)

Aside from a few things that just didn't take, indoor seed-starting has gone really well this year. If only outdoor sowings in this chilly spring were as speedy to take off. Don't think we are likely to get peas before the plants poop out from heat - March 17 sowing is about three inches tall now...

Spring intensifies!

Despite chilly temperatures this week, spring continues to progress, so what the heck, let's have some more flowers!

My favorite daffodil, Yellow Cheerfulness

A little epimedium hiding away in a corner

Way too much celandine poppy

Baby clove currant blooming!

More daffs - I think Bridal Crown? So many daffodils right now...

Viburnum 'Mohawk' in bloom - we need Smellovision here

Blueberry flowers

Polemonium that is bluer than this really

Valerie Finnis muscari

Just to prove that I do have some tulips even if out of focus

Redbud

Didn't photograph dogwood flowers, but this is what happens when you prune the tree and sap leaks out and gets colonized by bacteria (or maybe fungus). Very colorful!

Dwarf rhododendron in bloom

Cherry laurel about to bloom. Such a funereal plant, but it does screen well.

Transplanted lilac is now blooming!

And like Piglet, I think violets are very nice.

April goes boom!

Last month for GBBD I had practically no blooms outside; this month it's an explosion. Mid-April seems to represent the largest regional variation; I've been seeing photos from my mom in NH of the still-melting snow. Here in Maryland we are about ready to mow the lawn, and the crocuses are done. Redbud and dogwood are just breaking; I haven't seen any tulips yet, and my Mohawk viburnum isn't blooming. But the rest of the spring flowers are going nuts.

Very early daffodils are done, and late ones haven't opened yet, but most of mine are mid-season. The last-pictured ones I'm going to have to try moving when we have a new deck built starting in the next couple of weeks. If I chop them off above the bulb in my usual fashion, oh well.

And sorry about the Vinca minor, but I like it; I know it's a thug. And ha, the bleeding heart arising from the Virginia bluebells. Bleeding hearts are thugs in my yard too.

The end of winter?

I haven't posted here since winter began, and it has been a long one! We got only a couple of feet of snow total, but the cold was intermittently severe (for Maryland) and the biggest snowfall was the latest. After a week of above-freezing temperatures and some rain, it's finally melted, aside from plow piles and shady spots.

Actually this is a very good way to identify the shadiest, coolest spots in the yard - where the snow takes longest to melt. Though this remaining snow is partly due to shade and partly to snow blower additions.

I'd hoped to have more flowers to report for GBBD, but no such luck. I do have lots of snowdrops:

but as of my walk-around yesterday, that's it. I saw a crocus a few days ago, but failed to take a photo, so it doesn't officially exist. Next week there will likely be an explosion of color, but it's a long way to daffodils yet - they are only three inches high. This is always the point when I realize how far out of DC I live, because all the photos from there are full of flowers.

I can show you my lovely cabbages though:

I started them at the beginning of February this year, to make sure I had big plants to go outside whenever that was possible. Today I am starting the hardening-off process, and preparing the cold frames (which were buried in snow a week ago) to shelter the plants through this week's below-freezing dips. There is still a small chance of snow at the end of the week, but resolving into rain. Crossing fingers that I can safely plant out by the end of the month.

Here's to spring!!

Mid-December update

No flowers to share for GBBD this month (though we do have shockingly-colored shiny balls in the magnolia branches) but it is the time to start going through the seed catalogs that are quickly accumulating, and this year instead of putting lots of sticky notes on the pages I'm trying out a preliminary wishlist on my Pinterest page, with links to seed company web pages; I've been through three catalogs so far. (Note: I got the Pinterest account as a place to stash images related to my novels, and am not entirely caught up on doing that, but the "Gardening" board that should have lots of stuff in it has practically nothing. Someday it will, but I think I function better as a collector in specific categories than as a general noter-of-cool-things.)

You may note that there are about twenty zillion kinds of radishes listed there. I'm not going to grow them all (even though I have two gardens to work with) but I've been enjoying colorful radishes and finding them delicious roasted, and would like to expand my repertoire a bit. And the idea of the wishlist is to get all the possibilities down in one place.

Other things to do, aside from look through more catalogs, and take inventory of the seeds I already have:

• Soil test for the community garden plot (probably should do one for the oh-so-pathetic fruit garden too)
• Finish cleaning up the fruit garden area, which got very weedy this summer
• Decide, with some nod to reality, how much I can actually do with the weed- and black raspberry-choked back part of that fenced area
• And ditto, with the rest of the "way back"

Of course, a lot of that depends on weather, but we usually have some decent non-snowy periods to work outside in. We'll see.

The moment of the poppy and the moment of the boxwood

… to paraphrase T.S. Eliot.

I've been thinking a lot about time recently (not surprisingly - my new book is coming out soon) and of course particularly as it relates to plants, spurred on by two ideas. First, the Remembrance Day poppy. We've all seen photos of the lovely display at the Tower of London -

- with many thousands of ceramic poppies representing the dead of World War One. But it's even more poignant to consider why Papaver rhoeas took on this symbolism in the first place: because they are the first flowers to recolonize the fields of Europe after the damage caused by warfare. You could say, melodramatically, that they sprout out of ground soaked in blood, or more realistically that they do well in soil that's been stirred up into mud and had all its layers disturbed and then been compacted by feet and hooves and heavy vehicles. They are tough little plants, determined and opportunistic; not long-lived individually, they store a seed bank in the ground and keep coming when all other plants give up. They are practically designed to be symbolic of battalions of soldiers dying and being replaced until the seed bank is exhausted.

Secondly, I read Adrian Higgins' excellent article on tree planting this week in the Washington Post, and was struck especially by this ending paragraph:

But if you want to be far-sighted, you could follow the example of Huw Crompton, the landscape architect behind a 15-acre plantation of boxwood north of London, installed for the express purpose of providing authentic material for baroque woodwinds. It should be ready for harvest […] by the middle of the next century.

We have all sorts of timelines in the garden - the oak tree planted for the enjoyment of the next generation; the radish we're going to harvest three weeks from now; the bulbs we put in this fall for next spring and many springs after that - and nature has them too. One of the joys of spending years in a place, whether it includes carefully cultivated beds or wild areas or both, is getting to know its patterns of growth intimately: trees that you plant yourself and watch grow into maturity, trees that succumb to disease or old age and die, thirty-year-old daffodils and tulips that last only a season, the weeds that just keep appearing no matter how often you pull them out, the mushrooms that pop up after a rain and then vanish. Change is good, and so is continuity; more importantly, you can find both in ancient trees and annual flowers - even an old plant alters its form every year, and flowers that die in a season leave seeds behind for new growth (if they aren't bred to be sterile, but that's a human innovation). So go outside and watch time happen, and find your place in it: be humble and be creative and be an agent of change and continuity; be a gardener.

Mid-November blooms

I zipped out into the cold and took Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day photos. Yes, I have a few flowers! Here in Maryland it is cold (in the 30s F.) but not as cold as in the center of the U.S., where the arctic air has been forced well south (meanwhile, it is warm in Alaska). Next week we will have another blast of even colder air, so I think my blooms will disappear, but for now -

I love this. Two blooms appeared yesterday on this clematis (whose name I forget) that grows by the mailbox and refuses to climb it even when provided with assistance and support; it prefers to creep. These flowers are a very cheerful sight.

Of longer standing are the fall burst of roses on my Bonica shrubs:

They just keep hanging out there, not fading; I keep touching them to see if they are plastic, but no.

And there is still one battered Japanese anemone in the bed by the side of the house:

Also lots of nice fall leaf color still. Here's the Mohawk viburnum in front:

That one green leaf is not a joiner. You go, leaf!