Flowers for Mother's Day

Things that are blooming right now:

Mock orange

Golden alexanders

Columbine

Last of the daffodils - a poeticus

Pansies (with lettuce in planter)

Honesty (lunaria)

Bleeding hearts still going strong

Cranberrybush viburnum just about to bloom

Geranium

Scattered petals of:

glorious red buckeye

The thing that is no longer Allium bulgaricum

This is an Allium - about to burst forth

Dianthus that came back from last year despite being an annual

Clematis that likes to crawl on the ground near the mailbox

Sweet woodruff and celandine poppy

Lily of the valley

Bridal wreath spirea with nandina

Recording these in case they're gone by the fifteenth! Sunny today after a week and a half of rain - I wish I could have done more outside but my shoulder is very painful (hope this will pass). Got a few more plants in the ground though. Things are coming along...

April is the weirdest month

So after a lot of spring bloomers responded to the warm winter by flowering and leafing out early in March, we've been hit by deep chill and fierce winds in April. Who knows where we're going next, but I for one will not be surprised by a repeat of mid-May frost - don't put those tomato plants out too soon! I only had one serious blow from the weather - alas my poor kiwis - mostly because I've been too wimpy to plant stuff in it. My community garden plot is pretty empty...

Anyway, I do have a Bloom Day post this month, so here we go. Just photos and a very few words since I am too tired to look up all the cultivars or mostly the Latin. It is a riot of bloom out there (and today is beautiful).

Still have daffodils:

And the forsythia is still blooming, barely:

I don't have a lot of tulips left because squirrels and deer, but some of them are in bloom:

Redbud (the tree is tall now!):

Lilac, quince, Pieris japonica, and Mohawk viburnum:

Blueberry flowers that survived the north wind and freezing temps:

Epimedium and white bleeding heart (pardon the weeds, a phrase you can assume repeated throughout this entry):

Spanish bluebells, grape hyacinths, polemonium:

Virginia bluebells with bleeding hearts:

Bleeding hearts with celandine poppy - both thugs but pretty:

A friend is coming tomorrow to rid me of some of the excess celandine poppy, which as usual is occupying a good half of certain beds.

Packera aurea is starting to be a bit thuggish too but I don't care. I can dig it up and spread it around in sunny spots.

Another pretty thug:

A couple more daffodils for good measure:

And some pansies:

That's enough to be going on with. Happy Bloom Day!

Signs of spring

It's not really worth doing Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day today, but I figured I'd go ahead and post a couple of shots. Hellebore and daffodil closeups:

For the record, the first daffodils here bloomed March 9. I've also got crocuses (the snowdrops appear to be done), and I did see a miniature iris the other day but it wasn't around this morning. Magnolias are in bud, forsythia is forsything, but in general spring is sidling into view rather than dramatically bursting on the scene and announcing itself. Which is fine - we may get a frost and snow flurries this weekend, in time for the official start of the season.

Spring tasks

Haven't posted here in ages! Well, it has been winter - a rather strange one, with Christmas at nearly 70 degrees F. and then a blizzard in January (29 inches of snow in 1.5 days). Overall it's been a bit warmer than average (whatever that means anymore) and spring is raring to go. (At the moment there is an inch of new snow on the ground, but it won't last more than a day or so.)

I will have flowers for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day this month! In fact, there are snowdrops (which have been going all winter, even under the snow), crocuses and hellebores blooming right now, and daffodils will likely appear before the 15th.

My big task for the spring is to get going on this Food Forest Thing (FFT) which won't be strictly a food forest, since it will include plenty of native (and non-native) non-food-producing plants, but whatever it is it'll involve some planning and lots of land-clearing and planting. I should probably have a Five-Year Plan or something, but I get overwhelmed if I see things in too-large chunks of Help and Bother, so more likely I'll be dealing with it one little piece at a time. But here's the big picture, for once:

This is the view looking down on the Way Back (before it snowed, obviously). The fence posts (coming out slowly but surely, and perhaps faster now that we have a proper post jack) are the borders of the former vegetable garden. The gate frames are staying in, because they are cool and my athletic cat likes to climb them. Taking this, I am standing at the back of the parking area, next to the shed. We are going to build a retaining wall just in front of me. The mess of green fencing to the left is protecting some current (not currant - those are to the right) plantings, including a young fig tree which will become the focus of Guild #1 (or whatever I end up calling it). (Assuming it survived the winter.) There are also some raspberries that need to be moved, and some blueberries that will end up in the front side yard replacing the privet hedge if we manage to rip it out. Plus various herbs and little bush cherries.

I have re-formed the black raspberry parallel rows into a cross-shaped formation, which will be easier to access if I get behind on pruning.

I'll try to post here with updates. FFT Go!

Flowers still hanging on!

I thought I might not be able to post for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day this month, but in fact here I am. After the frost in October, we've had ups and downs in temperature, but on the whole it's been warmer than usual, so while most of the leaves have colored up and fallen off, some of the flowers that formed last month are still around. Here's what I found in a quick stroll around the yard:

Tropical milkweed

Pineapple sage

Zinnia

All tender plants, hanging on in a sheltered bed in the windy front yard. These floral displays would be pitiful in midsummer, but in November it's great to see those bright colors. I can also see some bright pink cosmos in my neighbor's vegetable garden from the back porch - cheery!

This is my 'Mohawk' viburnum which has decided for reasons known to itself to throw out a flower half a year out of season. *grins at it*

The 'Winterthur' viburnums in the back have nice shiny red leaves. They have grown a lot this year, and are looking like real shrubs rather than branched sticks. I'm looking forward to a red hedge in years to come.

And I have to laugh at the pawpaw tree with most of its huge leaves fallen off, clutching on to a few like it's reluctant to drop its underwear or something. They'll all be gone in a few days.

I hope all of you have flowers or bright leaves to enjoy in mid-November!

A few October blooms

Here's my Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post a day ahead. Yes, I still have a few flowers in bloom despite the drought (now ended) and the upcoming frost. Here are some of them.

I love toad lilies and need to get more of them! This is Tricyrtis hirta 'Miyazaki.' Such a cool thing to come across in an otherwise spent bed.

Sweet autumn clematis strangling the life out of beautyberries is a lovely sight. I really need to pull those vines off.

The conventional chrysanthemum/tall sedum (or whatever they call it now) combination. These need to be moved when they're finished flowering, because they block our view as we're pulling out of the driveway.

I think the 'Limelight' hydrangeas that are too big for their site know that I'm going to cut them down and replace them, because along with the gargantuan now-pinkish-brown flowerheads that started earlier in the season, they've put out a bunch of smaller, cute white ones to entice me into sparing them. Sorry, guys. (Plants do hear us talking about them, okay? Or else why did the annoyingly invasive and sticky Japanese pagoda tree - discussed in an earlier post - fail to bloom at all this year, meaning no seeds spread across the known universe along with no gunk on the cars? We still need to cut it down, but at least we can wait till spring.)

In other news, I'm working on the very early stages of the food forest project, in other words removing that darned fence. Slowly, with a lot of digging out of groundhog wire, ripping up morning glories and chopping down small trees, and using reverse engineering. It'll get there.