Garden Bloggers Bloom Day--The Meconopsis edition

Because Carol is a wonderfully gracious and understanding gardener and blogger, I know she'll forgive me for posting a bit of a bloom day report ahead of schedule. Because with our weather, who knows what will be happening by Sunday, when Garden Blogger's Bloom Day is really scheduled to happen?

Things are chaotic here. Not only am I busy with work, etc, backed up with emails to answer and other things to do, the weather has been moody as all get out. Decent enough during the day--after the fog lifts--warm, even hot, and raining almost every night. As a result the garden is LUSH with growth, from poppy seedlings to perennials and shrubs to weeds. Yes, weeds. I have plenty. I call them native plants for the most part.

However, one part of the garden is in reasonably decent control, because it's planted so profusely that it mostly controls its weeds. This is the part out front by the door. When I go out to fill the hummingbird feeders, I'm invariably smitten by a rainbow of flowers, foliage and fragrance. But I didn't see this coming yesterday.


The photo at the top of this post was taken on Sunday afternoon--less than 48 hours ago. This photo above was taken about an hour ago. What do you see? I thought you might notice it.

Regular readers of bloomingwriter know that there are some plants that give me fits. Yarrow, Russian sage, and others that want perfect winter drainage usually expire for me. Tomatoes ripen ONLY in the greenhouse (after they finally get planted, of course). But there are many things that grow well here, and for inscrutable reasons, I do fine with the coveted blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia. We have a few plants, and normally I add one or two each year just in case some of them arbitrarily die (that happens) or behave monocarpically, flowering and THEN dying (that also happens).

Three years ago tomorrow, my beloved father died of Alzheimers disease. It's hard to believe it's been three years already, and yet he'd really been gone from us since about 2001, lost in the hideous fog of Alzheimers. A few short days later that summer--on Father's Day--one of my Meconopsis bloomed for the first time. I went on to put that flower's photo on the cover of my first gardening book. (Optimistically, I call it my first book. Whether I go ahead and finish a second one is still up in the air).

Tomorrow will be an introspective day. I don't talk to people much on that day, other than family members, and am inclined to disappear somewhere, whether into the woods on my horse or down the road to somewhere else. Or I might just sit in the garden and look at the message that my Dad sent to me today. Tomorrow, it will be fully open.

Thanks, Dad. Still miss you, and always will.