gardening: observing, planning, designing, and editing
There are three natives in this yard that develop good-sized seed collections, which start getting distributed in July: twinleaf, trillium, and false Solomon’s seal. These plants did very well setting fruit this spring, but the nonnative Solomon’s seals, which seem to like similar habitats, did not.
Twinleaf seedpods are very silly—eventually they split open at that manic smile of a seam, ready to dribble seeds nearby.
The overnight low was in the 70s, and it was over 80°F before 10 a.m. this morning. You would need a soup spoon to get through the ozone-fortified, humid atmosphere outside. What a great time to sit under a ceiling fan and revisit the cooler days of May—and purpleness—but non-iris purpleness. Continue reading “Cooling Off: a Look Back at Spring Purpleness”
I wrote about irises, native and not, in the summer of 2020, but this time I would like to look at their succession through the bloom period, which starts in May and usually goes into June.
The month of May starts with native blue-eyed grass and Iris cristata, a US native, but not quite to this area. The blue-eyed grass, which is a failure in this yard as a bedding plant, adds a nice sparkle where it alights for about a month before it unobtrusively fades into the background. It is also extremely easy to remove unwanted seedlings as the root system is small.
The single most important and shocking thing about this Chicago Hardy fig tree is that it got through what passed for winter in this USDA zone 6a garden completely untrimmed and unprotected.
That’s not strictly true. It was unprotected, but it got trimmed by the resident rabbits. They left evidence.
April is the greening month. The earliest spring plants, which came up with not a trace of green, such as rue anemone and twinleaf, turn green. Other plants, such as crested iris and Pennsylvania sedge do most of their growing in these few weeks.
Continue reading “The Greening of Spring and Foreshadowing of Summer”
“Irrepressible” certainly applies to rabbits—chipmunks too, come to think of it—but late April into May seems to belong to the rabbits. These two did not budge when I came out with safflower seeds for the finches.
More recently, I have seen a small bunny, offspring I am sure, darting between hostas. It would be lovely if these rabbits would develop a taste for lawns. The height they mow the blue fescue to would be OK with me.
We’ve mostly gotten enough rain for the ferns. There are two very different ferns in this yard: the lady fern is small and well behaved, while the ostrich fern is big and…enthusiastic.
Last year’s leaves that are mulching the rain garden are a key to this fern’s size. Each of these small, erupting ferns could just about be covered by the oak leaf in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph below.
Looking at the bluebell photographs that I never got around to posting last year, two things stick out: this year’s bluebells came up over two weeks earlier than last year, and they did not get nibbled by ravenous rabbits. There are limits to what they will eat after all.
Tulips, even the fancy hybrids, will close to protect their pollen when it is going to rain. These tulips were a gift from a good friend, who fell in love with their changing colors and thought I would enjoy them too. I do! They go through shades of yellow and orange as they age.
Who knew? The chances of solid cloud cover were roughly 67% for April 8, but it turned out to be a lovely, sunny spring day with no pressing work to do that afternoon. I did not have eclipse glasses on hand, nor did I have a telescope handy. But I did have a strainer and a ring light that I use for Zoom meetings with a phone mount and a remote to click the shutter in the Camera app—I know there’s no longer a shutter, but what is that button called?
