Virginia Bluebells
Serviceberry
Meadow Sage
Quince (slightly garish, yes, but gorgeous anyway!)
So… what’s blooming your way this weekend? Still stuck with all that yellow?
😉
The frustrated wildflower photographer (me) roamed around the garden this weekend looking for flowers. There was nothing new in the woods, so I settled for what I could find in the less well-kept corners of the yard. You might think of these as weeds, but it’s really a matter of perspective…
The bunnies were treated to their first dandy-lion adorned salads of the season!
A bunch or two of grape hyacinths pop up in random parts of the lawn every spring and remind me of my mother who had them planted in a little bed with lily-of-the-valley.
I’m not really certain what this is, but think it may be bittercress? It’s blooming everywhere and must taste nice to someone.
The tiniest of yellow flowers, no bigger than the nail on my pinky finger, oxalis maybe, and nectar for a very tiny critter.
Purple violets, well before May Day, something else the bunnies like on their salads.
A couple years ago when my work schedule was flexible, I completed the classes and required volunteer hours to become a Master Gardener. If I remember correctly, I had to take 3 months of classes and *give back* 60 hours of volunteer work that first year. An awful lot of class time was spent learning things that I found pretty distasteful; mainly what sorts of herbicides would work to control broadleaf weeds like these in a manicured lawn. I’ve spent an even greater amount of hours pulling these weeds, and the summer weeds, and the fall weeds, and the winter weeds in the county parks where I do the majority of my volunteer hours these days.
The weeds always win. There’s always more of them. Why not find a way to enjoy them?
The first summer we put in our pond we were pretty conservative with the number of fish we provided for. I think we started with less than twenty and I worried that even that small number was too much for our 1100 gallons. There was, of course, some formula involving the number of gallons divided by the ‘inches of fish’ that confounded me, as does most math, so we sort of ignored it and hoped that we didn’t have too many fish to overload the filtration system.
Pond books also had me scared to death to actually feed them very much food. I had the idea that if I fed them too much, the pond would quickly go green and the goldfish would grow to monstrous proportions in just one season. So I fed them once a day, if I remembered.
However many years out now… 6 or 7 since we put it in… I’ve decided that most of what I read in books is baloney. Maybe you have to worry about all that crap if you have a really small pond and man-eating koi, or if you think of a garden pond in terms of an indoor tropical aquarium, or have no means of filtering it, but I’ve found that it takes care of itself pretty well so long as I just lea
ve it alone!
And the fish, well, they’re taking pretty good care of themselves too and multiplying. We added three small koi two summers ago and they seem to really like it here. They’ve certainly added some color to the mix of babies. Somehow the twenty or so survivors that we started with last spring have turned into…
Well, I’ll let you guess. You can try counting them in the pic, but like those count-the-jelly-beans-in-the-jar contests, it’s much more fun to just eyeball it and make a guess.
The person who guesses with the closest number wins all of this season’s babies!
😉
Note: I’ve finally added a category in the sidebar for pond posts, so if you should ever be in the mood for reading more, go there.
She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,–AA Milne
🙂
I watch the Star Magnolia in the front garden for a sign that it’s ready to burst and become magical. It’s pretty enough in the winter; the bare gray branches make some interesting shadows across the sunporch when the light is right.
For most of the year it’s just a big green bush; overshadowed and outprettied by the American Holly beside it. In early spring, with everything else shouting yellow, is when I fall in love with it. There’s something breathtaking about rounding the corner to home and seeing first this haze of white flowers. The show doesn’t last for long and the flowers often are marred by rain or freezing temps, but it’s beautiful however short-lived.
Spring is slowly ambling its way through the garden here; forsythia and daffs are blooming, the quince is in bud and just Wednesday I found the purplish tips of Virginia Bluebells and Bleeding Hear
ts forcing their way out of the dark in Cricket’s Garden.
Peepers are peeping and Phoebes are back, as is one of the local pair of Osprey, spotted just today on its cell tower nest by the train station. It’s curious to me the way spring signs seem so long in coming, yet when they do come, the progression is so predictable and welcome and right. The world is opening up again.
St. Patrick’s Day is an enchanted time – a day to begin transforming winter’s dreams into summer’s magic.
Only some Borland to share tonight: “It’s all a matter of proportion, and of the season. Two months from now there will be bees and blossoms and balmy air, and so much green that one new shoot will go unnoticed. But right now the sight of a crocus poking up and a few courageous daffodil tips showing is reason for exclamation and delight. Spring!
It isn’t Spring, of course. Not yet. But those first few tips of green, that venture out of Winter darkness into the light again, mean that things are beginning to happen down at the root. We won’t necessarily open all the windows tomorrow, and we certainly won’t take down the storm sash or put away the overcoat and the galoshes. Ice isn’t yet something that comes only out of the refrigerator, and we still know what a snowflake looks like. But to know again the gold or purple chalice of a crocus and to see the green fingers of a daffodil certainly warms the heart.
Right now, those few shoots of new, fresh green are more important than a whole forest of green will be in May. Those shoots are a promise of May’s green forest and the performance of March’s seasonal miracle. March, when the hilltops are still as brown as December, when you wonder if you will recognize an oriole’s song again, when you think even a dandelion might be beautiful, needs such miracles.
Maybe there aren’t many such shoots yet. There shouldn’t be, in the order of things. Miracles aren’t a dime a dozen, after all, even this kind. But they do catch the hungry human eye and they lift the spirit. We yearn for them, and we cherish them. We haven’t yet lost our sense of proportion. We won’t, until May.” –from Sundial of the Seasons
The neighbor’s snowdrops are tattered now, but she has crocus! There’s also what I think may be a cherry tree with a sunny southern exposure that’s come into bloom in the last day or two. The star magnolia in my front garden has just started peeling back her winter’s velvet to reveal the pink-edged negligee underneath. There’s still only the fingertips of daffodils though. The oriole’s song is still a dream, yes, but the chickadees are singing their “fee-bee, fee-bay” songs. What’s the weather report from your neighborhood? Is it still snowing? 😉
It’s fun now to begin thinking ahead to some of the littlest pleasures the garden will bring; the hard part is finding the patience to wait. I’m not the most patient of people; I sigh and wiggle and roll my eyes through the wait in the grocery store line, lay on the horn too often when the person ahead of me at a red light daydreams past the green and generally expect instant results once I’ve put my mind to something.
A garden requires a lot of patience; there’s soil to be tended and seeds to be coddled and months in between the intention and the reward. Winter and its end, I guess, is a time to respect the process.
At any rate, I thought today about some of the things I look forward to in the coming months. I was sitting outside the office around 11 this morning, in a spot sheltered from the wind and the weak sun was shining on my face and with my eyes closed, I could imagine it June, almost. Imagination or memory, I’m not sure which, brought me this:
~the flash of a hummingbird investigating the blooms of red salvia
~the taste of a sun-warmed tomato or a perfectly ripe strawberry
~the decision to give up on the pretty fingernails (or the ridiculous gloves) and dig recklessly in the dirt with bare hands
~the feel of walking barefoot through wet grass
~the calls of osprey overhead as they commute from the river to their cell tower nest by the train station
~the delight in burying my nose in the lavender patch heedless of the bees
~the tickles from a ladybug on my arm
~the hot shower that soothes tired muscles after a day spent digging and transplanting
~the surprise on a friend’s face at the tiniest of vases filled with lily-of-the-valley or an enormous bouquet of peonies and catmint from my garden
Simple pleasures… simple things to look forward to.
A bit more spring yellow… while I still like seeing it. Yellow gets old fast, I think. Anyway, these flowers remind me of something… I can never think of what it is they look like though.
Jonquils (aka Daffodils to us more Northern folks) sent by a friend from a place where Spring sounds to be making a bit more headway.
😉
Thanks J. for this peak at what’s to come. Spring will arrive and it’ll be more beautiful than we remember. Can there be anything sweeter than unexpected flowers from far away?
