Taming Rugged Acres: 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...