March 2024: Blooming Time

February’s crocuses and early daffodils were the opening overture for the springtime blooms. March followed with a solid performance of flowers mixed with emerging leaves. March began with the last of the crocuses and the final two of my four hellebores. The magnolia started slow, and I was afraid that it had been frozen out by a couple warm-then-cool cycles in the weather. However, I shouldn’t have worried because it soon burst into full bloom.

The first ferns began to unfurl, the raspberries and blackberries leafed out, the redbud bloomed, and life generally returned to my garden. By the end of the month, there was more than the promise of spring. I could begin to hear echoes of summer approaching in all of the bright colors and bold blooms.

I still haven’t done much gardening for the year. I planted a small raised bed of lettuce, which then took its time to get growing. I also did some cleanup here and there, but that’s about it. I was out of commission with the flu for part of March and was traveling at the end, so it’s good there wasn’t really much to do. At this time of year, I just let the plants do what they want to do, and I’ll assess where we’re at once things get a little farther along.

April 2022: Spring Unfurls like a Fern

It’s amazing to see the changes that took place in my garden during the month of April!

The month began with the earliest blooms, which were mostly crocuses, still happening around my garden. The ground in my garden beds was still predominantly brown with some tufts of new green scattered here and there. By the end of the month, I was enjoying a riot of color and too many shades of green to count. The mid-spring blooms, including most of the daffodils, came and went, and we had moved on to the late spring bloomers like the tulips, tiarellas, and irises. By the end of the month, my garden beds were fully carpeted in lush, rich greens, and it felt like my garden was singing.

To get from the start to the finish, so much needed to unfurl from the earth. It all began small and compact before growing rapidly and expanding to quickly fill the available space. The process is pretty incredible to watch. You can see it happening in the photos below. If you flip through them, you’ll see the same plants getting bigger and broader through the month. You can also see the more short-lived flowers pop up and then disappear. Some of my favorites are the ferns whose tightly curled fronds make beautiful and interesting shapes.

I tend to feel like the end of April through the end of May is the best time in my garden. June brings heat with it, and the plants feel like they begin to shrink back a little in order to conserve their moisture. That, and my vegetables tend to get too big and too messy about then. Till then, everything will stay on the upswing of expansion and bright greens of new growth.

April 2021: The Greening Returns, part 2

A short time ago, WordPress updated all of the behind-the-scenes stuff for the blogs it hosts. It’s been a little bit of an adjustment for me. There are new ways of doing everything and a lot of my old ways of doing things are gone. So, I wasn’t exactly surprised when I went back to look at my last post about my garden and I realized that several photos were missing. I guess WordPress decided I had enough photos in my post and it cut me off!

I’d spent time choosing, editing, uploading, and labeling them all, so I didn’t want to just delete them. So, now you get a few bonus April photos from the end of the month.

April 2021: The Greening Returns

I’m a little later than I’d like in putting together my review of all the things that happened in my garden in April. Part of the problem was that I had a lot of photos to sort through. All month, plants were growing, expanding, and blooming. I’d catch a great color combination or combination of leaf textures one morning, and then by the evening the colors would have shifted or the shapes would have changed and it was a whole new and beautiful thing to see.

At the start of the month, the green had definitely begun to return to my garden. March had seen the emergence of all kinds of plants and several rounds of early blooms, so April was marked by a lot of expansion among my perennials and the later spring blooms. You’ll see that happening in the set of photos below. As always, you can click on any photo for a caption with more information about what you’re looking at.

The month started with unfurling ferns of all sorts, plus fritillaries, tulips, tiarellas, grape hyacinths, my later daffodils, and epimedium. When everything is so small and delicate, I imagine lots of fairies stopping by. For vegetables, I’d started a few tomato seeds indoors at the end of March and I had some lettuce outdoors that I’d tried to get going last fall. The lettuce didn’t do much until this spring, but I cut at least three rounds of salads off of it before cutting it down in May and starting some fresh greens.

The redbud tree our front put on its usual show all month. I love its progression from buds to full blooms that make the branches look zig-zaggy then the emerging, heart-shaped leaves changing to full-sized hearts. By the end of the month the perennials had expanded to fill their usual spots and the irises and azaleas were blooming.

Like I said before, April is always a very pretty month with many changes and lots to see!

March 2021: Another Day Another Flower

I’m a little behind in posting my review of the month of March. Partly I was making sure I had a batch of new cat photos posted here. But also I’ve been busy taking more photos of all the new things growing and blooming and changing before my eyes.

There was certainly a lot of that happening in March. At the start of the month, things were mostly brown and covered in dried leaves. First came the crocuses–one here and another there, always surprising me with a new color in a new spot. I’ve scattered them in a lot of places around my garden with that in mind. The irises came soon after. This is only the second year I’ve had them blooming in my yard, and I love their pops of color. Then came the snowdrops–all descended from a clump I took from a spot where an old farmhouse was torn down.

Along with all of these blooms were the hellebores. I’d never heard of them before I started my garden, but now they’re some of my favorites. They fill the early garden with color and vegetation. Their flowers are frilly and fancy, though if I’d realized how much they hide these pretty flowers by facing them downward, I would have planted them closer to the edge of the bed where they would be easier to admire.

Then came the big show: the magnolia tree. Every year, it’s a magnificent show. The blooms last for several days, making a beautiful progression from buds held on the limbs like candle flames to newly-opened blooms that are fresh and bright to aged blooms edged in brown bruises and then to the aftermath of petals strewn over the ground.

In the middle of the magnolia blossoms, the daffodils began blooming. Like the crocuses, I’ve got a wide variety planted throughout my garden, so they surprise me with new color patterns popping up at different times and in different places.

As the daffodils started to bloom everywhere, many other perennials began to make their presence known. Ferns began to unfurl. Each variety has its own patterns of growth as it emerges from the ground and expands into the garden. There’s also a patch of the native wildflower trillium that appeared around this time, followed by the fritillaries, whose little checkerboarded lanterns I love. Around this time, the blackberries and raspberries began to leaf out, the hops emerged from the ground, and the irises began to expand to fill their section of the garden with their bright green blades.

In food news, I was able to eat some garden harvests in March. I finally finished the last of the sweet potatoes that I harvested last fall. I roasted them to make a side dish for a balsamic chicken. And the lettuce that’s been biding its time all winter under a plastic dome is finally exploding, providing tasty early season salads.

And all month, I held off on new spring plantings, not wanting to have things ready to grow outside before the weather was warm enough for them. Just before the end of the month, I got my tomatoes started. On the last day of March, I had tiny seedlings in each of my six seed pots. In April, I’ll start a few more types of seeds indoors, but I’m trying not to rush.

March 2020: The Quickening

I just finished reading a book called Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland by Lisa Schneidau. It’s organized not by seasons but by the turning of the year. Its chapters are: Asleep in the Dark, The Quickening, Struggle and Hope, Joy and Sunshine, The Height of Green, Ripening Time, Harvest and Home, and The Turning Wheel. I like the poetic descriptors for the seasons within the seasons.

This March has definitely seen the quickening. The very first day of March gave me the first little flower surprise of the year. I was spending a little time with the outdoor cats when I happened to glance at the dull, overwintering grass and realized that there were two jewels that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

I’d completely forgotten about the bag of iris bulbs that I’d planted last fall. It had been an impulse purchase at Lowe’s and I wasn’t expecting much. But here were some returns on that investment, and they were beautiful.

it was not much farther into March when the magnolias were clearly preparing to burst forth. As they moved from buds to full blooms over a couple weeks, the other flowers in my garden gradually shifted. The snowdrops and crocuses that began blooming in February slowly faded and daffodils and hyacinths took their place.

The magnolia dominated my garden with its usual splendor. Then, more green shoots from my perennials began to emerge. I worried that my raspberries didn’t like the spot I made for them last fall, but then I got another surprise: bright green leaves suddenly fanning out on the canes.

By the end of the month, nearly everything was green. The ferns were curling and twisting their way out of the earth. The early blooming perennials like the tiarella were expanding to make frothy mounds of leaves. The curled shoots of hostas were poking out of the ground and slowly unfurling. Healthy leaves promised tulips in April.

I started some seeds and such in March, too. On March first, I put some sweet potatoes in water, hoping they’d start sprouting. Mid-March, I started some tomatoes and put them under grow lights indoors. They should be nice and big, but not too big, when it’s time to put them outside. I tried not to do too much planting, though, so hopefully nothing will get caught in a final chill should we get one.

One additional point of interest: archaeologists working across the alley from us. There will be a big apartment building going in there and it’s funded with HUD money so they have to complete an archaeological survey. The archaeologists did some test digs and then brought in a backhoe. I thought it was interesting, and (surprisingly) the cats did, too. Lady Morgaine was very intrigued by the backhoe.

The photos below are in chronological order so you can see my garden changing as the month goes by. If you click on any individual photo, you’ll get a slideshow and some basic plant information.

A Cat a Day: March 24

Mark among the crocuses

February 2020: Cats and Crocuses

February wasn’t horribly cold, but it wasn’t warm either. I wasn’t tempted to be out working in my garden ever, and my crocuses ran late this year with the first ones waiting until the end of the first week of February to bloom. Often they’ve been much earlier. Still, there were no Polar Vortices and there was no snow, so I’m not sure what held up the spring bulbs.

By the end of February I had a smattering of crocuses and two hellebores blooming around my yard. I transplanted a group of the crocuses last year to keep them out of the way of the EPA soil remediation, and they seem to still be regaining their strength. I think they’ll continue to put their energy into settling into their new locations and not into blooms this year.

And that’s all that happened in my garden in February, so again this post features more cats than flowers. Everyone knows where to get toasty and relaxed despite the winter chill. The Ladies frequent the heat vent on the stairs and their sunny cat tree in the back door. Perry hangs out with me and in the warm dryer after a load of laundry has been removed. The outdoor guys hang out in (or on) their heated cat hovels, then come out and roll in the sun if it’s warm enough.

I have my seeds for the summer and plans for where to plant them, so things should start to pick up in my garden in March. The sun is up decidedly earlier now and the weather is warmer, so it won’t be long!

The Most Beautiful Time of the Year

I’ve been so busy taking pictures of my garden that I haven’t had time to edit and post them! All through April, I saw wave after wave of beauty come through my garden and the entire city. The soft greens, bright spring bulbs, pastel redbuds, frothy cherry trees, pink and white dogwoods, fluorescent azaleas, and deepening greens make the world feel airy and light. Everything is new and perfect.

My garden emerged from dormancy. At first I was still waiting to hear what the EPA contractors and subcontractors would do to it or not do to it. Now, however, I am much more hopeful. If everything goes as I’ve discussed with all the workers, things will be OK. It’s taken plenty of energy, though. I’m really not one to complain and put up a stink, so it’s been a lot of work to continue to be “that crazy lady” to all of them. Hopefully it pays off in work I’m happy with.

Below is a slideshow that takes you through most of April 8-27 in my garden. You will see things emerging and expanding to fill their spots in my different garden spaces. I love the way the plants change and develop throughout the process. There are also a few cats mixed in for good measure.

Spring Arrives, but Where Will It Go?

Spring is firmly upon us now. A bright greenness seems to hover over my garden as the new, tender growth unfolds. It’s the same cycle that has passed over my garden for years now: the first shoots, early bulbs blooming, the hints that things are alive beneath the soil, then quick growth skyward. You can see the progression of things in the slide show below. Remarkably, these photos were taken over the course of only one week–from 3/31 to 4/7. There is a lot of growth there. If you flip through the photos, you will find captions.

The plants are growing happy and energetic as usual, but I still see so much uncertainty when I look at them. I met with the EPA subcontractor several weeks ago, and it didn’t go well. Now the contractor is supposed to be meeting with me to go over my concerns, but I haven’t heard anything for weeks. I still hope that things will work out better, but it’s incredibly stressful.

It seems appropriate that this is the first year that I’ve lived in this house that the magnolia blooms were destroyed by cold during their early stages. Instead of the usual exuberant explosion of color, there were only scattered blossoms. It matches my mood.

I’m not planning to buy plants or seeds. It makes me sad. But then a new catalog arrived in the mail and there was a little hope. It was the catalog for next year’s spring bulbs to be planted this fall. That is something I can hope for.

The nice weather has meant that Perry gets to go out for walks on most days. We usually spend a half hour just wandering around our yard and our neighbor’s yard. It’s his daily attitude adjustment time, and the fresh air seems to help with his bitey-ness and aggression.

Yesterday evening, John and I were out walking Perry and a couple kids who live further down the block were riding their bikes on the sidewalk. They were about 5- or 6-years-old, so, young enough to notice and comment on weird stuff going on. One boy looked through the fence at us and said, “Look at that do…CAT!”

Later he rode his bike past while John kept Perry out of the way. The kid looked at Perry and reassured him, “It’s OK, kitty.” It was very sweet. We felt it necessary to tell the kid at that point that he couldn’t pet Perry because Perry bites. He seemed oddly to have already figured that out.

Meanwhile, the Ladies are fluffy and fantastic. They do not need daily attitude adjustment time in order to be good. They are always perfection!