Spring In The Wild Cultivated Gardens

A walk in magic when the native stinze joins in. Click on a picture for the slide show.

 

Fothergilla On A Different Day

 

The Fothergilla

 

Along The Primrose Path

The Bluebells have started their bloom.

In another week, it will be a carpet of Bluebells.

 

A Look Up My Driveway

It is lumpy bumpy right now. I need to rake it smooth. That last gully washer washed it good. It needs to be top dressed and lightly regraded. Over the years a lot of it has washed down the drive. It is turning into an actual gully.

Today it is spring. The air is warm. The gardens are stirring to life. The gardener is back to work. The driveway can wait for another day.

The Serviceberry

 

Easter

It smelled good. The blood was minimal that afternoon re-fencing, replacing the ancient and rickety barbed wire fence on hundred-year-old locust posts that came down during the logging operation next door. Now it is raining cold.

An Easter Bloom Day

My house smelled amazing when I got home this afternoon. I caught a bouquet of evicted lilies before they were left out in the cold. The first flower opened while I was gone. The house smelled so good, I had to crack open a window.

It's Bloom Day on Easter weekend. Let's go out for a walk in the garden. Then you can go visit Carol at May Dreams Gardens for more Bloom Day festivities.

I have Creeping Phlox

And the last of the daffodils.

The late blooming daffodils are a safe bet in the vicissitudes of spring.

Into the forest with Golden Ragwort and Celandine Poppy.

The Trilliums are rising.

The multi-petal Bloodroot.

There are acres of gardens to wander and more in bloom than I can record. I also needed a bucket of rocks for a small wall restacking. So I went and did that.

One bucket was good. It wasn't enough. I will be out in the garden. I can fetch more rocks on an Easter weekend, out in the mountain top garden.

Untying Hairballs

There was a successful attempt to get into the old Picasa photo editor as you can see by the copy right text in the first photo. On the second try I was locked out again. Something is amiss and remains so. I can't keep storing photos on this computer.

Computers have a mind of their own. I am starting to lose my mind. The forgetting has begun. This blog is extremely dated and is in desperate need of a makeover. Merging the computer mind with my mind to accomplish that seems like a rather daunting task these days.

I muddle along entwined in a hairball.

The snow melted quickly. I've been wandering about to see how fresh spring growth fared in the snowy cold.

The daffodils were still there with only a few more bent flower stems. Freeze damage of any form was undetectable.

All of that fresh green growth is bulbs. In two more weeks, Bulbarella's mountain will be covered in blooming Spanish Bluebells. If all goes well. That is never a given.

Trilliums and Celandine Poppy are multiplying with abandon.

Tomorrow, I go for my post-secondary cataracts eyeball checkup. Hairballs. Eyeballs. The garden grows on.

In A Gentle Spring Snow

A quick walk to the mailbox.

It has been snowing steady, off and on, light and heavy, fat fluffy flakes and round pellets of sleet since yesterday afternoon. It sticks and melts and sticks again, a late season snow.

I spent the morning doing the ink version of the tax forms. They are signed, sealed with imaginary money inside and ready for a Monday morning departure. I need to get serious about eating more food from the roadside vegetable garden. If I only had a chef.

Along the scenic byway there is a bicycle riding through the forest trees.

And purple icing on the hill beside the drive.

Purple snow, yes, this is for real, light melting snow on blooming creeping phlox. A rather surreal and fascinating sight I don't recall ever seeing before on the return trip from the mailbox. So much of life's beauty is ephemeral.

It takes the memories of bones to slow the ephemeral down.

Before and After Hail

Come for a walk in the spring garden on two different afternoons before and after hail. Last night there was a short duration hail with a strong gully washer. Lots of thunder and lightning directly overhead. Next comes the snow and cold. You're on your own. Go.

This is where the waters pour in from two culverts above.

The ground was scoured of leaf litter. Deposits of that and of road grit, which no doubt has ample winter salt, were left where the waters begin to get absorbed into the garden below.

Where the waters will carry me away.