gardening: observing, planning, designing, and editing
Like all spring ephemera, twinleaf lives the expression carpe diem—seize the day. It takes about a month from groundbreaking to seed-setting. They erupt from faintly greenish pods, with flower buds wrapped protectively in reddish purple leaves.
By March, every creature, including us, is a bit fed up with winter. When my children were younger, I would send them to school with the reminder that the first one to spot a crocus on their walk would get chocolate, and then we could all celebrate the imminent arrival of spring. They learned to look and where to look, and they got chocolate.
Continue reading “Two Easy Traditional Early Spring Bulbs and One to Avoid”
I write about these every year; these winter flowers keep me going. I think people are always a little surprised by the thought of flowers in winter. Snowdrops are not quite as surprising as witch hazel, but they are both reliable winter bloomers that don’t quite make it to spring most years.
What a dreary, dreary month. It’s…Novemberish. November has Thanksgiving, its saving grace, but it is gloomy, chilly, and daylight disappears noticeably. And here we are, in January, and it’s gloomy, chilly, and daylight has not reappeared because of the heavy cloud cover. And it snowed overnight; heavy, wet snow.
This is being posted in 2024. This post was drafted last year, but languished on my computer following an accident. I am dating this according to when the photographs were taken so that the posts land in the right spot in the timeline.
So much for August. August brought rain, causing some plants to sulk and wait for drier days. September is feeling more like August—a lot of dry, sunny days with pleasant temperatures.The Japanese anemones budded a little late, but bloomed the first week of September, as usual. They had—I kid you not—flower stalks that are pushing 4 feet in height. I did not have to bend over to get photographs of these flowers, which just started to bloom.
It is not your imagination—this is being posted in 2024. This post for July 2023 and the next, for September 2023, were drafted last year, but languished on my computer following an accident. I am mostly recovered, and finally have the bandwidth to take care of the fun, but nonessential, things in my life. I am dating this according to when the photographs were taken so that the posts land in the right spot in the timeline.
It seems like an odd time of year to see mushrooms, but we’ve had roughly 1 ½ inches of rain since July 11. We started the year with a rain deficit, then caught up on rain until May, which was quite dry. June was OK, but July has been unusually wet. Continue reading “Mushrooms in July!”
I love Rosa setigera, a June-bearing native rose that is somewhat variable in size, judging by the information I could find online. I was hoping for a medium-sized shrub when I put it in the rain garden in 2017, but it had other ideas. I moved it from the rain garden into the myrtle next to the house in 2020.
We had a 5¼-inch rain deficit from September–December 2022. It turned out to be the third-driest year of this century for us.
I was thinking that we started spring relatively well hydrated until I checked the local precipitation data through the National Weather Service. January–March had a rainfall surfeit of over 2½ inches, but that didn’t completely make up for last fall. It was enough rain at the right time to make the early spring plants happy, including the ginger.
The roses seem relatively happy this year, although I think at least a couple will need to be moved this fall due to encroaching shade.
I have a very nice apricot shrub rose that catches sunbeams in early morning light. It’s been bugging me for years, so I decided to see if I ever knew the varietal name of this rose. I started with my photographs from 2000. Yes—the end of the last century; I have verified that by June 2000, I had already lost track of the name of this rose. The rose has always reveled in sunbeams, and I have always reveled in its reveling.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the weather has been peculiar this year. We went into winter in a drought, but picked up a lot of moisture by early spring. The drought ended. By the beginning of June, it was drying out again, which usually happens in late July or early August. Purple flowers made quite a splash this year, because they had a good start in the spring. Continue reading “A Drying Purple Period”