gardening and Landscapes and Modern Photos eastern redbud, gardening, photography, trillium, tulips 14:30
Taken in the last few days, these show the big garden, some tulips in the rose garden, some trillium grandiflorum under the chestnut trees, a bit of path east of the house, and the redbud on the east lawn which is still surviving!
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Esperanza and gardening and Landscapes and Modern Photos gardening, photography 10:37
View from the south porch, showing the little kitchen and pergola…now if I could just get the clematis to grow along the top bar rather than curling up in a bunch…
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Garden curves I hadn’t noticed before….flagpole garden and the west drive. The white flowers in the daylily line are daffodils, Pueblo and Sailboat.
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gardening and Modern Photos gardening, insects, photography, tulips 08:13
This little guy has been camped out in this tulip for several days, even through yesterday’s rain. I am not sure what he is going to do about the fact that the tulip in question is steadily turning pink…can spiders change colour?
gardening and Landscapes and Modern Photos gardening, photography, wordless wednesdays 10:13
yesterday afternoon, from the big garden looking south.
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We have, out in the big garden, two lovely Chinese Chestnuts. I am not sure of their exact species. They are, as far as I can tell, dwarfs. In twenty years* they have not grown appreciably larger than about fifteen feet in height and spread. They are quite elegant in their outline and have spectacular yellow/pink/white flowers every year (the hummingbirds adore them). Two years ago, they managed to have fertile seeds. I knew of only one seedling, and carefully tended it in a pot before planting it in prime location this spring. In the week since, I have found two others.
They are lovely trees. But they are also memorials. For me, the two mature ones are inextricably linked to my grandmother, Eileen. They were well loved by her. I presume she planted them when she was still able to garden. Shortly after she planted them, for a myriad of reasons, the garden became an impossible, overrun tangle of Norway maple seedlings and weeds. That they are now focal points of the garden, how I wish I could share that with her. They are, I suspect, (though I shall never know) a dream of a lovely garden deferred a generation. In them there is a lesson: what comes after cannot be controlled, what looks like failure may not be, for even as we fail it may be that in our failure we have cast dormant seeds that will succeed. Victory even in darkness.
*As far as I can tell they are nearly the same size as when I started wandering about in an overgrown tangle as a teenager.
gardening and Modern Photos gardening 10:20
A group of flowers in the big garden. Theoretically, these are ‘Albert Heijn’ and ‘Flaming Purissima’ tulips with ‘Van Sion’ daffodils. The ‘Flaming Purissima’ is definitely correct, they are the taller streaked pink/white ones. The ‘Albert Heijn’ is a little uncertain. They are the right shape; but the color is not quite what we had expected. It is a lovely color, but more towards salmon than purple. Hard to say why.
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Someday, I will diligently write down precisely what I planted where. This year the biggest mystery are the wonderful orange tulips by the well-stone, pictured a few days ago. The problem is that we didn’t plant orange tulips there, or at least the shipping order for last fall doesn’t have orange tulips on it or at least doesn’t have those orange tulips…. They are quite pretty, much better than the plan. The problem is that not knowing what they are makes it rather hard to deliberately replicate….
I think I am confident that the lovely cream daffodils in amongst the daylilies on the fence row are in fact ‘Pueblo’. I was uncertain for awhile.
Fun and games.
gardening and Modern Photos gardening, photography 08:42
Bloodroot is one of those amazing spring flowers, they aren’t there, aren’t there, and then overnight there they are in all their glory. The flowers of the bloodroot are incredibly fragile, the slightest touch will cause the petals to fall. They are also, however, one of the truest White flowers out there. Like some other flowers, such as iris or trillium, the cells in the petals are very reflective, so a large clump can be almost blindingly bright in the sun. We have one large clump (about two dozen flowers this year) and several smaller clumps elsewhere, on the theory that having them all in spot is hazardous.
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Acair Fearann 