Peeking at petals

Remember only a few short weeks ago, when the only way we could enjoy spring-flowering bulbs was to have them indoors, either as bulbs or as cut flowers?

Well, those options are still available, at least with tulips. I can't resist tulips as cut flowers, so I buy them quite regularly, and spend a good deal of time peeking into their silken secrets. I love the way tulip petals catch and hold and reflect light. It is no wonder that people have been maddened, and gladdened, by these luminous beauties for centuries.

But let's not mock the smaller, less showy bulbs of spring. The temperature has shot up gratifyingly in the past 36 hours. And with it, spring decided to kick into gear again in our soggy, still cluttered but happy yard.

I love crocus. Especially I love stalking them, watching them as they act coy in cloudy weather or early/late in the day.

I love watching them get happy in the sunlight and offer their petals up in exultation to the rites of spring. Nothing April Foolish about their colours. No photoshopping here. Just happy flowers in spring light.

I have a whack of pink chionodoxas planted in my gravel-garden-in-progress, and they are multiplying nicely every year. They also bloom before their blue siblings in another part of the garden.

And the striped squill, or puschkinia, are also multiplying nicely. These are all low-growing bulbs, barely out of the ground before they're in flower. They're tricky to photograph especially if you're like me: a gardener and writer who takes photos but isn't a real photographer. So I find the best way to learn is by experimenting.

The snowdrops are still doing their thing in great glee. In fact, some of them, in more shaded parts of the garden, are just popping up now. LongSufferingSpouse hasn't done a snowdrop count yet, but I suspect that will happen today. This darling double lifted her head enough that I could get an almost-focused look at her ruffled skirts.

Meanwhile, the big patches of doubles are happily stretching themselves a little taller, and opening their blossoms a little bit more with each passing day.


Friday afternoon, the sun really pushed away any lingering clouds, the temperature grew warmer and warmer, and the gorgeous orange stamens on the crocus proved irresistible for more than one honeybee seeking a lunch. I felt sort of like I was a peeping jodi watching this one snuggle gleefully into the flower.

And this one, basking in some fully open pink glories-of-the-no-more-snow, seemed to pause and pose for the camera. It's official, even in Scotts Bay. Nature declares that spring is with us, at least for a day or two.

I hope that whatever you may be celebrating this weekend fills you with great joy, and also that you have time to marvel at the perfection of petals. Let us all, like Margaret Atwood says, come into the house smelling of dirt.

More interesting new blues from plant breeders.

We all know that in flowers, blue is the rarest colour. Which means some of us go koo koo for cocapuffs over it. Quite a few of us, actually. That number would include me, of course. From the glorious of the difficult, divaesque, but oh-so-beautiful blue poppy...


To the stately cobalt splendor of blue delphinium...

And even the dainty, delicate, spring chorus of scilla drive mere mortals to frenzies of bountiful blue blossom blissdom.

Well, you know how plant breeders are. They're never content to rest on their laurels, and they've been at work developing some more blue flowers for us to enjoy. The following stealthy, shaky, grainy photos are of a few cultivars that your intrepid correspondent risked life and limb to get photos of for your viewing enjoyment.

For those who are thwarted by growing blue poppies, perhaps you'd like to try this dandy geum, 'Til I'm Blue Cooky'. I think it would work particularly well, like most geums, in full sun with well-drained soil.

We're always taught that hemerocallis come in every conceivable shade except black and true blue. Well, we can cross the latter off the list with 'Crazy Iovanni', which to the best of my understanding was created by genetical manipulation, introducing the DNA from the blue April Fish into one of the showier of yellow daylilies, 'Fools' Gold.' I wasn't able to ascertain, from my lofty perch in a truffula tree, whether the foliage of this new hemerocallis was evergreen or not.

Ah yes, the blue rose. We've all heard about how some things are as 'rare as blue roses.' Well, once again, the GMO wizards have been at it, splicing some DNA from that blue delphinium with multiple excited protons from the Large Hadron Collider, and zapping them into a pimpernelifolia rose. Meet 'Harison's Blue.'

And apparently pollen from the bluebanded bee, when stolen from a blue Eryngium planum and dipped onto a double white coneflower, yields this blue eyed beauty, 'April BlueNose.' Because I was in deep ninjacover while clambering around in trees, I couldn't hear the breeder say when any of these blue beauties would be released, but I suspect it will be probably around June 31st of next year.

Whew. It's sooooo good to be out of March, isn't it?

Wordless Wednesday: March goes out with hummingbird dreams of summer

A little Farch denial...

Well. On Friday, the weather decided to throw that Farch snit I've been expecting for several weeks, first bringing us a little snow, then dropping the mercury down well below zero Celsius. I decided to throw an equal though less dramatic snit by getting sick and spending most of the weekend in a befuddled haze, when actually awake. Today, the weather has moderated in temperature though now the snit has converted merely to galeforce winds. I'm over my sicksnit and getting on with the business of well, business.

You may remember I went to an orchid show and sale several weeks ago, as an anodyne to Farch weather, and that a paphiopedilum orchid sort of followed me home. I thought I'd show off some of the incredible orchids AND their amazingly amusing names, just to push back the crabbiness of Farch a little bit more.

I really don't know all that much about most orchids (other than a little about our native species, and a bit about phalaenopsis plants because they keep following me home. Orchids remind me a little bit of cats, purebred horses, or other fancy creatures, in that the naming of orchids "is a difficult matter, it isn't just one of your holiday games..." I'm sure T.S. Eliot wouldn't mind me adapting his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats into The Orchid Fancier's book of Delectable Names.

Anyway. This delightful creature in the top photo is called Cymbidium 'Stonehaven Cooksbridge.'


Meet Vuylstekeara 'Fall in Love'. Well named, indeed because I think it's quite easy to fall in love with something this exquisite.

Oh, this is what followed me home: Paphiopedilum 'Limerick x Greenvale x Cherokee.' I have no idea what any of that means other than it's three crosses of cultivars, and that I decided it was time to take the leap to a paph. So far, Limerick is doing fine in my office.

Now this one I understand. Laelia 'Santa Barbara Sunset' seems a great description to me because although I haven't been there (yet), these colours, I suspect, are similar to those of a dreamy California sunset

Meet Dendrobium 'Crystal Pink.' The cool thing about this plant is that the flowers are small, about the size of a guitar pick. Alas, I didn't have a pick with me, and I don't want to show the photo of my broken thumbnail beside the flower. Just take my word on this, okay?

I have no idea who Andree Millar is/was, but how lucky to have a Dendrobium named after her!

This is Dendrobium aberrans, and again, these are tiny flowers: each one is about the size of a thumbnail. I seem to be drawn to the dendrobiums, but maybe it's because they were faithfully labeled AND I took photos of the labels so I wouldn't just say, "oh, there's a pretty one..."

Here's one where the breeder had a lot of fun with the name. Say hello to Degarmoara 'Skywalker Red Star.' It seems to me there were other 'Skywalkers' there, but I could be wrong about that.

This is a plant that I remember from other years, so obviously its flowering schedule is pretty consistant. This is Cymbidium 'Pelleas Merah'.

Staying with the Cymbidiums (which I dearly love and want to have), this charmer is named 'Ming Pagoda.'

And to wrap up this display of exotic perfection, let's say hello to Slc 'Crown Jewel.' Now. I have NO idea what Slc means, other than it's probably an abbreviation for some kind of crossing of genera. If someone who knows more about them would like to clarify that, please leave a comment, by all means. I don't like being inaccurate with information, but this isn't what you'd call an informative post: it's mostly eye candy to help us get through what's left of Farch, and into what Annie of The Transplantable Rose calls Marpril.

Of course, the coming of April will bring out the T. S. Eliot in me yet again, as I get to quote from my favourite poem ever. And what, do you suppose, might THAT poem be? Dear friends and gentle gardeners, I leave you with that until the changing of the month.

Skywatch Friday: A bee's-eye view of the sky?

Okay, I confess right now. This isn't what you'd call a conventional post for Skywatch Friday. However, we have come to that time of year when I sometimes forget to admire the sky because I'm too busy looking at things at or near ground level. Soil level. You know what I mean. It's gardening season!

I had to go to Truro on Wednesday and give a little talk to the Friends of the Garden at my first alma mater, the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. (yes, I have several almae matras. You wouldn't really expect me to take the conventional route through academia, would you?) The Friends tend to the incredible Rock Garden at AC, and if you live in this province and haven't been there, you are missing something extraordinary. Even in winter.


After we were done, even though the sky was drippy and grey and cold, I went out to walk around the campus a little. I had my pocket camera with me, a compact and clever little Canon Powershot SX200. I love that little camera. Drop it in my purse along with my iPhone (geek) and I don't need to drag laptop and digital SLR with me if travelling light. It has an impressive lens on it, too, with the ability to focus very closeup to subjects. So I thought about what it might be like to see things from a bee's eye perspective, when it comes to plants. Not so much the actual image they see, but what it's like to see from the ground up, rather than our normal perspective. First stop was the heath and heather bed, which has overwintered magnificently this year.

Then down to the rock garden, where many things are still quiescent, snuggled into their mulchy beds, dreaming of warmth and sunlight and the cue to begin. But these semps were watching me watching them.

And the creeping thyme didn't mind me creeping up on it with my little camera.

Oh, what a surprise. Jodi is still taking photos of snowdrops. Well, yes, I'll keep doing that for weeks yet. They make me happy. And raindrops on snowdrops...well, that's just one of my favourite things. Hmmm. I think someone sang a song along those lines.

It was raining in earnest when I went across the road to the Alumni Gardens (Aggies once, aggies twice...) so I didn't linger. I did, however, want to hang out with this sycamore, because its bark and its funny alien fruit amuse me. The fruit wouldn't co-operate by falling from the tree intact, so I contented myself with admiring the trunk, which looks like a piece of exquisite sculpture.

Enough with the rain. Back to Collins Hort Building I went, and the small greenhouse was open so naturally I went in there to have a look around. I think some of the plants in there may well have been there when I was a student, or are offspring of those original plants. Not the standard poinsettias, though.

I do LOVE succulents, and I keep saying it's time to learn more about them. Well, while I was away, a nice box of books arrived from Thomas Allen & Son, who distribute Timber Books here in Canada. And a nice book by Debra Lee Baldwin was in that box of books. Not her new one--I'm not sure how that happened, unless it's backordered here in Canada, but I didn't have Designing with Succulents, either. So I'll have fun with it while waiting for the new book.


This cactus delighted me, with its furry crown studded with little pink jewels of soon to open flowers. Rant: One of my peeves in life are the plant companies that stick strawflowers to the tops of cacti in an effort to sex them up for clueless customers. The real flowers of cacti are much, much more interesting. So stop doing that, stupid plant companies.

Well I feel better for that, don't you? Let's move on to this tiny, dainty, charming succulent, which I assume is a sedum but I might be all wrong about that. Whatever it is, I love it and want some.

And to wrap up my bee's-eye view, there's a huge, wonderful hoya hanging in the Collins greenhouse. And what do you know but it had a number of clusters of perfectly sculpted, perfectly scented flowers hanging from it. I don't know that this photo will be enough to inspire mine to flower sometime soon, but it's worth a try. The blossoms of hoyas are marvelous. They can fill my sky anytime.

Wordless Wednesday: "Now’s all there is..."

I may have an ugly garden. Depends on what day you look.

The past few days, there's been a disturbance in the garden blogging 'Force.' It all stemmed from a post made, perhaps with the best of intentions, about ugly unkempt gardens, mostly of the vegetable type. We’ve had a lot of sometimes heated talk in the past few days about ugly gardens, and messy gardens, and gardens with no design to them, and WEEDS, my dears.

There’s been twittering. There’s been blogging. There’s been myriad comments in defense and in umbrage of the original post, and I’m not gonna name the blog nor the blogger, but I am gonna confess my own sins.

Well, to begin I have this thing about weeds. The worst weeds in my estimation aren’t ‘weeds’ at all, but naughty ornamentals gone out of control. Like the bane of my existence, goutweed (Aegopodium). But otherwise...I really like most of the plants that many would call weeds.

I grow milkweed (Asclepias syriaca AND A. incarnata along with butterfly weed, A. tuberosa). I do this to help out the monarch butterflies, which cannot survive without milkweed. I also let a honkin' big patch of nettles grow up by the spruce trees, because there are the food source for red admiral butterflys (in cat form). I let a lot of wild plants--daisies, goldenrod, asters--do their own thing MOSTLY outside the garden beds, but if one or two plants creep into the perennial borders, no biggie. Bees, songbirds, butterflies, and other benign creatures depend on these plants to help them survive.

There are also gorgeous, glorious wild orchids on our property, some species of Platanthera (fringed orchids) and Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium), a hugely important butterfly plant. And spruce trees, and young firs, and mountain ash, and scubby wire birch, and carex and juncus and many species of wild grasses, many other shrubs and trees, growing in a blissful and healthy riot in the upper parts of the property.

Along the lower border, edging the paddock and a swampy ditch, there are willows, which many people decry as being bad plants. They take up some of the swampiness and create habitat for my beloved frogs. There are major numbers of cattails in the pond; perfect hiding places for small reptiles and amphibians, nesting places for my beloved redwinged blackbirds. There are alders all along the edge of our pond, bounding much of our property, and creeping into the lower pasture where we haven't mowed for several years. Alders are despised by many people. But they are excellent plants for securing stream and creek banks, filtering out toxins from water, providing food and shelter for wildlife.

There are dandelions in my lawn. Lots of clover. These both feed the bees, while all the perfect lawns at the McMansions a few miles off with their lethal doses of chemicals don't feed anything except the wallets of lawn care companies and big chemical.

All these things would give the average suburban home association a massive attack of the pearlclutching vapours. I'm blessed, however: I live on 7 acres, with a woodlot to the north of me, hayfields to the south, and a benign neighbour up the road and across about 200 feet. However, those driving by can't see what I'm up to, and you know what? I don't care if they do. (Oh, but Grace, I did finally get the Christmas wreaths and the swagging off the house and arbour. Today. The snow finally was gone from the base of the arbour that we could move it.)

This time of year, everything is a mess. As you'll see from the photos, even today, there is still snow in some areas. As it melts, it makes parts of the yard very squishy. In an effort not to compact things down more, we're only working around the edges of the drier gardens. I test a lot of plants, and so we don't always have big drifts of perennials because I'm trying a new shrub or perennial and things are accordingly spotty. But colourful.

In our family, I'm the primary income earner, which I do as a freelance writer, photographer, editor, sometime speaker. A lot of my income comes from talking about/writing about/taking photographs of gardens and gardening. And my mantra is "We can all grow great gardens.'

What that term 'great garden' means to you may be totally different from what it means to me. Here, my great garden is a mix of natives and introduced, heritage and hybrids, brand new and old faithfuls, trees, shrubs, perennials, grasses, ephemerals, annuals, bulbs, herbs, even a wee few vegetables. Yours may be three scarlet geraniums in a clay pot on a deck. They're both awesome, because they bring us joy.

In being a freelancer, rather than working for some company as a writer, things can be challenging. I have one client who is always significantly behind in paying me, and others that are occasional clients, others who are awesome and regular, which help me to build cushions for when I'm waiting to be paid by the big client who likes to hang onto their money til the last moment. So I don't have the spare cash to, say, hire a designer to deal with levelling some of the land or building me the stone wall I dearly want or doing any of a hundred other things that could be done. So we do them ourselves, what we can. This year, I am adding more soil as soon as I find some that is decent. I want to join a few beds, top up some areas, raise one section for an idea I have. Due to health issues, mostly mine, we can't do a whole lot in the run of a day, either. A couple hours for me and I can barely move, and I'm in constant, tedious, pain. But I work away at it, and LSS helps when he's not cutting firewood or doing some odd job elsewhere, or working at his own passions (his boat).

So it's not designer-perfect. But it's ours and we love it. If you don't love it, well, then send me some of your spare cash and I'll hire a friend of mine to improve it. Or, just don't look at it. We won't be offended.

And you, whether you have a balcony of succulents or a 20,000 landscaping job, whether you live on a suburban plot or revel in wide open spaces like we do...I hope you love your garden too. Just as long as it's yours and it makes you happy, it's all good. I won't criticize, but I will cheer you on.

I just want people to plant gardens, and plant things they enjoy, and enjoy what they do. Beyond that, we're learn as we grow together. It's NOT all easy, for sure. It can be strenuous, expensive, timeconsuming, frustrating. It can also be heaven on earth.

So just bloom where you're planted, have fun. If something doesn't work, try again next year, or use something else.

Like me. This afternoon, I go to say my last goodbye to my friend Dick. Tonight, if it's not snowing, I'll plant two American chestnut trees in his memory. That's what he wanted: for people to honour the earth in his memory by planting a tree.

Namasté, fellow gardeners. Onward and upward.