- Share This Post
- submit
- 6
-
Sparkle (0)
Spring has Sprung/The grass is riz'/I wonder where the flowers iz??
I would repeat this (grammatically FAILed) ditty every spring as I prepared my parents' garden beds for planting our summer annuals. For some reason our house was not blessed with the tulips, daffodils, forsythia, violets, and other bright splashes of spring color. We had everygreen shrubs and brown beds waiting my Spring break week of labor, and Memorial Day weekend of planting.
I longed for a spring garden that looked more like this photo rich with sweet william, phlox and tulips if only because it did not require as much labor in the cool, still-short days of spring.
Spring gardens are a little bit of magic. Bulbs, corms and biennials planted the cooling ground the autumn before, sleep during the winter, then surprise us all by coming to life as the earth warms. The earlier crocus might bloom in a blanket of late spring snow, but they bloom.
To get the full impact of blogger's spring garden magic, check out May Dreams Gardens. On the 15th of every month is published a submitted list of flowers blooming in gardens all around the world for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. April featured flowering trees and bushes -crabapple, viburnum, serviceberry. There is also a Mr. Linky widget so any blogger can link to their monthly blooms. There are currently 144 blogs listed. Think I will be #145.
Some of these GBBs bloggers:
Cultivating Paradise is a south Texas blogger. She highlighted her bougainvillea.
Welcome to Greenbow highlighted some earlier spring blooms and remarked:
It seems that every day I can go into the garden to find new blooms open. It is such an exciting time of year. I planted a few of these little bulbs last fall and I can't find the name of them but they look so sweet in the cold damp days waving in the wind
Daffodils and tulips are showing up the Seattle garden of Greenwalks.
Even if you don't have yard space, OutsideIn highlighted some wonderful blooming plants to grow indoors.
Margaret Roach, of Away To Garden, explained her love for psychedilic spring: in praise of anthocyamins those plant pigments that have a near psychedelic effect on color - reds, purples and blues. (click her links for great photos).
Looking for me this week? I’ll be crawling around on my knees in search of another hit of the good stuff, like the species peonies, which are really wild right now. Meet some more colorful characters:
The common bleeding heart, Dicentra spectabilis (epecially the gold-leaf cutivar ‘Gold Heart’), gives the peonies a run for their money; so does Jeffersonia diphylla (twinleaf) and many heucheras. Scientists postulate that in some cases anthocyanins, flavonoid pigments which are often masked in the main growing season by the green of chlorophyll, may either serve to deter herbivores from nibbling tender new shoots or perhaps help attract pollinators, a kind of lurid “come hither” ensemble.
In Elizabeth von Arnim's Elizabeth and Her German Garden, she effuses about a certain spring, listing the magical spring flowers in sequence:
During those six weeks I lived in a world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three lawns,-- they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,-- and under and among the groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few stray periwinkles and Solomon's Seal, and all the birdcherries blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to the joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs--masses and masses of them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the side of walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could see, shining glorious against a background of firs. When that time came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies flowered under the south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and
