We had huge, beautiful sunflowers towering over the other garden plants until it rained - no wind, really! - and they just. Flooped. I am sad.

The lilies known as "Vanishing," "China," or "Resurrection". Everything else around here is looking pretty stressed, but these guys apparently tolerate drought fairly well. A quick search tells me that they are more closely related to amaryllis than to daylilies.

Morning glory volunteers always climb the porch steps

Flower "bed"

Me: why aren't my nasturtiums doing any better?

Him: Dunno! :)

Years ago, after we dug up the whole foundation of the house to treat it for waterproofing, we planted a row of shrubs on the west side. I wanted to have some beautiful blooms outside what I hoped would someday be kids' rooms. That was a plan that actually ended up going right. This shrub, wiegela, is just full of butterflies and hummingbirds this time of year. The only thing we did wrong, and I can't believe that we did it, was plant everything too close to the house. They're all a bit asymmetrical and leaning away from the house. Very pretty, though.

Precipitation appreciation

Wow. I've been sitting on the porch, listening to a soft rain and the hum of the beehive. (the bees live inside the porch pillar)

The seeds and transplants are in the garden, except for a few fall crops that get planted later. The flowers my daughter bought are planted in the flowerbed. The new asparagus roots are, hopefully, all ready to sprout.

Boy, I am not in a great place mentally this evening. However, there are flowers blooming (ridiculously early) and birds singing.

I hope we all have a good and gentle May.

Bouquet

The other day I was strolling the upper edge of the pasture, walking dogs, and started collecting myself a tiny bouquet. I found wild forget-me-nots, which I could swear I've never seen before in my life. However, they are so tiny that it would be easy to pass by and miss seeing them. Then I started collecting tree flowers. The redbud, of course. Nannaberry make lovely little umbels of tiny white flowers

If you look at them closely, they look like Barbie-sized bridal bouquets. The hawthorn has buds just about to bloom, and the crabapples and apples are blooming white and blush-pink. Then there was this thing:

Each twig has a tiny clump of leaved just budding out, and a fringey ring of small flowers around it. One of the twigs was low enough for me to break off. I didn't recognize it, but when I smelled the twig (a surprisingly good way to id different types of wood) ZING! Sassafras, babey! I guess this was the first time I'd ever run across a young sapling that was old enough to bloom, but still sufficiently small that the flowers were low enough to see.

I also had to get a shovel and dig out some debris from the top end of the culvert pipe. Reaching into that black pipe to pull a stick out gave me the heebie-jeebies. I was very brave, though. The spring-fed run is dramatically sparkly and fresh and cool.

Spring 2010

[ID: A photo of a small girl in a sunflower-print dress kneeling by a large orange tabby cat. They are both holding daisies. A photo of the same girl standing in grasses and wildflowers up to her shoulders, looking straight at the camera. A photo of the wildflower patch with a black cat sitting peacefully. She is looking at the camera with golden eyes.]

Lovely, but troubling. All the flowers that usually begin blooming in early May began blooming in the third week of April, this year. I used to take my mother a bouquet of phlox (the white flowers above) and wild columbine every year for Mother's day, the second Sunday of May.

The flowers are: pink, bleeding heart; white, wild phlox; yellow, tulip; white&yellow, daffodil; blue, both English bluebells and Virginia bluebells. The greenery might be fire cherry, I need to look it up. Prunus pennsylvanica. If it is, I'm excited; the only wild cherry trees I'm used to seeing around here are Prunus serotina, which has tiny black cherries the size of a pea. I'd LOVE to find other types of wild cherries!

Good lilac morning, y'all. The apple and crabapple trees are blooming.

Foraging

Monday I picked dandelions and violets to experiment with flower-flavored syrups. It was time-consuming, but I just felt like trying something new. I have done violet jelly before, although the results were mediocre.

The first step after separating the petals from the greens was to pour boiling water over each kind and let them sit for a day. The violets had a greenish-blue extract by evening, and by morning it had settled into a deep blue. I tried adding a couple of drops of lemon juice, which shifted it to blue-purple. Violets have the same pigment, anthocyanin, as red cabbage, and it is pH sensitive. I am curious why my tap water (from a well) would have a pH of 9(ish), but I'll go ahead and blame limestone.

I cooked the dandelion first, adding sugar equal to the amount of liquid (1.25 cups). I cooked it for a while and then bottled it when it seemed like it had thickened up (the bubbles start to PLOP instead of 'pop', if that makes sense).

Here it is, compared with honey. The color is virtually the same!

Then I started with the violet. As I heated it, the color shifted BACK to greenish-blue. I added a little more lemon juice, and it ended up weirdly purple from some angles and blue from others, depending on how the light hit it. It's also DARK, too dark for me to photograph and show you much color. When it cooled down it a) turned a steely blue-grey and b) crystalized.

That. that is NOT what I was going for. It also doesn't really taste like anything. Just 'sweet'. Drat.

The Flower Fairy

Once upon a time there was a little flower fairy.

She could be any size, really, for that is part of fairy magic, but mostly she was small.

She loved to linger on the lilacs and visit with butterflies.

She looked into the bells of columbines to see if there were busy bees.

She checked each tulip and buttercup to make sure their colors were bright and true.

And she loved to play chase with the oak elf who lived in the tree at the west edge of the yard.

And so she passed the summer, overseeing each flower and loving them all in turn.

Rainy day snowdrops

Sunny day snowdrops!

The overcrowded area where I transplanted these from three yrs ago is STILL very full, so I dug another bag of them to transplant on Monday. I went around to visit them this morning (rainy) and they all look bright and perky. It isn't *ideal* to transplant bulbs while they're flowering, but these guys are so tough and resilient. See also grape hyacinths: those are so tough you can throw the darned bulbs on the soil and forget to actually plant them - and they will STILL live and bloom.

Glorious August

I walked the dogs out to the far pasture the other day, because there are (apparently) many things that must be sniffed out there. It is always pretty, but this time of year it just gets better and better (especially since we've have unusually abundant rain the last month). There is a wet area between the field and the creek that we fenced off to keep hooves out of the swampy areas. It is shoulder-high in wildflowers.

Where the flowers are thickest, the butterflies are practically elbowing each other out of the way. There are always two or three male swallowtails having some kind of territorial contest, flittering in complicated patterns. Probably showing off for the ladies! I also had a photography assistant:

Baxter wants to "help" me; Chance wants to herd cats. That has never worked for him, but he will not give up.

The upper part of the pasture is covered in Queen Anne's lace and knapweed (plus numerous other, smaller flowers). And so many bees. It looks for all the world like an impressionist painting, doesn't it?