What Will It Be

I plant things with some notion of what they will grow to be, what they will look like with their neighbors and how it all fits into a bigger picture. Some things grow so slow here it could be decades before an egregious error shows itself. But then I have a chainsaw.

There are a lot of things in the wild cultivated gardens over which I have little or purposely take no control. You can see my other three colonies of Mayapple in this picture. They come to full leaf a bit later than the the other colony just over the border.

The Mayapple is just one of the native wild plants I let be to do what it wants. There are countless others selected and allowed to remain for some redeeming garden worthy quality.

Because so much goes on about its business without my input, I never really know what the garden will be from one year to the next.

Will the tulips come back next year? The daffodils will.

The Darmera peltata looks like it is going to bloom this year. It doesn't happen very often and I have come to think the flower buds get frozen by late freezes most years. This April has been freakishly warm so far.

It is grown more for the huge leaf. When we get flowers it is a bonus.

What will it be? The mystery lily/orchid I rescued last year from a precarious situation is going to bloom. That means I will be able to ID it. One is already three. I hope it is an orchid.

One of the things I planted knowing full well it could go wild and become another item I did not control is the Celandine Poppy. This is a shade tolerant native woodland perennial that blooms with the spring ephemerals. A whole lot of them can be quite the show. They generously self sow.

I will find out what happens in the years to come.