It didn’t take long, and it didn’t take much warmth. Things are popping in the garden. Today’s topic is native spring ephemera; the hallmark of spring ephemera is that they come up early and then disappear completely sometime in the summer. They are also usually very small plants.
Virginia bluebells, Mertensia virginica, are an oddity size-wise: even freshly germinated seedlings are large; they bud in shades from bubblegum pink through mauve, get fairly big very fast, bloom prolifically in a beautiful clear blue, and then keel over. They need to be planted where something even bigger and more distracting will come up because they literally keel over and linger, yellowing, before dying.
