What's Blooming: April 30th

For this post, let's keep it simple.  I post a camera roll of pics with a caption. You ooh and aah from afar, and I pretend I can hear you :-)

Pansies!  This is a survivor (1 of 3, from a flat) from last fall's planting.  Not a great success rate, but in their defense, we had a rough winter.

This is Tahiti, a variety of daffodil I have been stalking for several years.  I finally saw it offered by the wholesaler I deal with and I jumped on the chance to get them. They were not all that expensive (wholesale is generally a better option), and the color is amazing.  It's hard to tell scale from the picture, but they are at 3-4" across.  I love the double petals and bright orange center.  I've had a photograph of these daffodils hanging in my house for several years, one that I made Eric take at MOBOT. For those of you locally, take a spin by Lake St. Louis Meadows and you will see literally thousands of these mass planted around the West entrance.

Lowe's never fails to have a good deal.  I got three large containers of these pure white pansies for $1.00 each.  Great early spring color that can stand up to these dipping temperatures and hold me over until I can get some warm-weather annuals.

Brunnera

The bird!  He came with me from the old house.  I gave him a fresh coat of spray paint -- Rustoleum's oil rubbed bronze finish.  As good as new.  I love the contrast of his dark bronze with the chartreuse creeping jenny.

Another daffodil I got from my wholesaler connection. I will have to look up the name of this variety, it escapes me at the moment.  Each stem produces 6-8 flowers and they are just about the size of a nickel.  The foliage is very thin and stringy like grape hyacinths, and I actually thought these were malnourished when they started emerging from the soil a few weeks ago.  Tiny foliage, tiny flower.

Baptisia -- this one is yellow.  I'm excited to see it come back after the hard first summer it endured.  It had no leaves on it by the end of August due to some insects eating them all.  I was sure it was a goner.

Coral bells

Angelina sedum.  Love how it turns a reddish color in winter and emerges with bright chartreuse foliage that will stay like that all summer.  I'm learning to focus on foliage color and texture, it makes for a MUCH more interesting garden composition.

Another bargain bin find at Lowe's.  2.5-gallon creeping phlox for 99 cents.  I got 12 for me, 6 for my friend Diane, 6 for my mom, and 6 for the neighbor.  At such a great price, I couldn't leave them.  This photo was taken last week and they are still going strong.

More Lowe's bargains... $2.00 per pot... except some nasty wild animal got a hold of these.  It's so odd to me that it would eat the foliage and leave the berries.  Hmm... I am wondering if this nasty beast was a weed eater...

Redbud trees are a little behind at my property because we sit low, where all of the cool air drops and hangs out.



Wild Sweet Williams, blooming throughout the woods. 

Wild Trillium, also all over the place.

Blueberries.  Great deal on these... I got 6 of these, 3 thornless blackberries, and 2 red raspberries.  All $2.00 each, normally $11/each.

Chives!  I have to figure out a way to show scale in these pics.  These are the tallest, healthiest chives I've ever grown.

Spring Comes in with a Bobcat...

You've heard the expression, "Spring came in with a bang"... well, in my case, it all started with a Bobcat.  That is, our neighbor Jerry's Bobcat. 

If you recall, Eric and I decided to create a new driveway, one that is level, one that wouldn't leave us stranded in snow, and one that wouldn't leave our friends and family members without four-wheel drive stranded in even good weather.  The old driveway is still there, and connected to the new.  It's a convenient way for the UPS and FedEx delivery trucks that visit us almost daily to come in and circle out with ease.  They both used to struggle leaving, shooting gravel at our house as they peeled out up the steep incline. 

To keep our new driveway functioning and looking great, we decided it would be best to add a retaining wall to stop erosion.  When installing the driveway, Jerry had already repurposed part of the stacked boulders that had surrounded the 2-car parking pad that we tore out to make way for the new drive.  So, we decided it would be nice to continue the theme and make everything look cohesive.  Many of the boulders were starting to crumble and crack though, so while we liked the idea of rock, we were sure we'd need to choose a different type.

We headed to a local rock yard and picked out our rocks, 5 palettes to be exact.  Realizing a delivery fee was inevitable, and how much we had already gotten ourselves into, expense-wise, we also threw in a load of topsoil and an enormous granite boulder covered in lichen that I discovered on our way down to the weigh station.  Let me just say rocks are really expensive.

Jerry and Eric made short work of the palettes and the resulting retaining wall looks great.



All I see when I look at this is major rock garden potential!

The delivery guy was kind enough to place my granite boulder at the entrance to the new drive.  It looks wonderful, but just as I suspected, it looks a fair bit smaller than it did in the rock yard.  That's okay.  I still love it.  My mom and I have joked for years when we've been out in some great park or in the woods that "we'll take that rock over there".  It's always the most ginormous rock in the whole place -- think Elephant Rocks big.  I've got the small chip that fell off one of those.



I should have had Tyler pose with it to give you a sense of size... perhaps in a future post.