Garden Bloggers Bloom Day: Surprises indoors and out

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm quite pleased about this. Here I was thinking that all I'd have to offer in the way of blooms for this month's version of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (created and still hosted by the delightful Carol of May Dreams Gardens!) would be the forsythia that I clipped last weekend, and which has obligingly popped into bloom. After all, we're still in the dreaded Farch, right?

Well, yes we ARE, but the weather seems to have gone into detente. As you saw in the previous post, we still have quite a bit of snow in some parts of the property, but otherwise, winter seems to be in retreat this week. I managed to get outside on Saturday and get quite a bit done in the places where there was no snow, before my joints screamed "Eeee-frakkin-nough!" and I had to go inside and recuperate.

This lower bed is one of my favourite parts of our garden. Not only is it a memory garden to beloved people lost to diseases, it's a pollinator garden from early spring until the last killing frost.

It's also home to the earliest bloomers in the garden. Hamamelis Diane is just stretching out her flower petals hesitantly at the moment, unconvinced that this time it's safe to do so. Under her strong, graceful limbs, Hellebore 'Ivory Prince' whispered this afternoon that it was probably safe to remove the evergreen mulch, at least for a couple of days.

This hellebore is doing very, very well thanks to the tutelage of several gardeners: Frances gave me wise tips a couple of years ago on how to cope with late winter/early spring when it comes to protecting hellebores from erratic weather. And Mr. McGregor's Daughter, (Barbara) did an excellent post on cleaning up your hellebores just the other day. I haven't taken the secateurs to mine yet, mostly because...I can't find my secateurs. Ooops. I hope they aren't in the bottom of the compost heap. I hate it when that happens.

Now, I know, I got a little excited on Friday night/Saturday morning, and told y'all about the first of the snowdrop flotilla putting in an appearance. Haven't started to count them yet, because there's still snow in part of that garden, and the other bed still has evergreen boughs over it because of my precious echinaceas and some new stuff I'm trialing. So we don't want to tickle the weather deities' feet too much. Or else I'll wake up to three feet of snow on top of everything again. And then I'll swear like a sailor. Trust me. I can do it.

But I will give you a sneak peek of what these double galanthus will look like in just a few days, if this weather continues. They are so small, yet so fragrant and so happy-making.

A further programming note; because I'm still really buried in work, I'm going to let the current 'Spotlight Saturday' blog stay as is for the rest of this week. There aren't enough hours in the day, and work takes precedence. But that's fine with me. I have snowdrops. And hellebores. And daylight savings time. It's all good, friends. It's all good.