A tower of Clematis power

Clematis jackmanii and Ville de Lyon

I'm finally getting the two-color Clematis display I've always wanted—it's the second flush of bloom for this red Ville de Lyon—with the jackmanii. The red has never double-bloomed for me before, so I don't know if it's the weather or if it's just big and mature enough to do it. But I am loving it.

I'm finding the clematis becoming an important source of long-lasting summer color, and much better able to withstand hot sun and competition for soil moisture than my hydrangeas. The hydrangeas just cannot compete with the Douglas firs, even in the shade. I really need blues in my garden, and I'm beginning to think I need to make a switch. It's hard to watch the hydrangeas suffer, but water is a precious resource, and for me, "right plant, right place" is the golden rule in gardening, and it means not wasting water to grow plants that use twice as much or more, than more drought-adapted plants.

Small pleasures

 It's been really nice to finally have a few hours in the garden this month, between the storms and showers.

It's a season of small pleasures this spring. Like the violet hue of the siberian iris leaves as we were coming out of winter last month. Never seen that before.

The perkiness of a stand-up hellebore looking at the sky;

The pink, yellow, and blue of the heuchera, Yellow Hammer rhody, and the forget-me-nots;

Two days before I took this photo, this camellia had nothing but buds on it. Then—boom!

And the new leaves of the Shirasawanum Autumn Moon coming out of their pink wrappers;

And last but not least, the fractal-like leaf colors of a hardy cyclamen seedling popping up in a new spot yards away from its ancestors, where I'm happy to have it.

Flowers in January!

I don't want to jinx anything, so I won't talk about our weather so far this year, but I've been keeping an eye on my Arnold's Promise Hamamellis, just waiting for it to pop out in bright yellow. It's usually the first to bloom, so I wasn't paying any attention to the Jelena, which usually blooms a few weeks later and is a much younger tree. I noticed a bunch of stuff on the branches, though, from my window, and went out to check:

It's got a few dozen flowers already, and Arnold is still working on his first ones!

The weeds don't look too bad yet, except in one small area, but after the winds we've had, it looks like The Land Of A Thousand Branches. Plenty of cleanup to do later.

I also spotted this fungus, which I've never seen before. Sorry it's a bit blurred, but I love the form. It really looks like a log-eating fungus, and I suspect it's coming up from the filbert stump I cut off and buried last year. Welcome, pretty one!

And the licorice fern is really having a good year with all the rain we've had, even hanging off the playhouse roof! I love this stuff too—what's not to like?

The rhodie buds are getting nice and fat, and hellebore buds are popping up all over. I really love how you can have flowers in the winter, on the dull, gray, damp, cold, gloomy, frigid, blustery, near-freezing, shivery, otherwise cheerless days. It's one of the best benefits of gardening.

A thousand paintings in my garden

As on many other Sundays, I started the morning googling new-to-me artists and artworks, and found quite a trove of them. Looking at the great variety of locations and subjects made me feel that all the work my garden requires is like a great anchor around my neck, keeping me here working on it when I could otherwise be out doing plein air paintings and exploring beautiful places. Then as I was opening my back bedroom window, I looked down across my blooming red daylilies and geums to the billowing zebra grass just starting to show its warm-weather stripes, past the blue mopheads of the Nikko Blue hydrangea, to the soft cloudy light reflecting off the metal barn roof. I brought out my camera to take a photo, and ended up taking a dozen as image after image clicked in my mind as being so very paintable.

Daylily Apple Tart

I took back the words of my lament and ate them as quickly as possible, and laid my misplaced remorse at the feet of Mother Nature, as I resolved to honor these works of life in more, and hopefully better, paintings.

Jackmanii clematis in Big Apple Kousa dogwood

The now voluminous Nikko Blue

Mixed perennials with my new armillary

Satomi Kousa dogwood, the second tree I planted here

Daylily Chicago Ruby

Looking up through the Satomi

The Fairies' table

There's atmosphere in my garden this morning

Back yard primeval

The sun broke strongly through the fog this morning and made my garden all bright and fuzzy. Happily, it was warm enough to walk around and pull a few fir branches out of the shrubs, look at my camellias that are blooming two and three months early, and wonder again how many days of branch-breaking it will take to reduce all the blow-down to mulch.

The warm light in the warm-ish air showed off the bits of light red

Hamamellis Ruby Glow, Miscanthus Zebrinus

and bright red

Coral bark A. palmatum

and green

Viburnum cinnamomifolium

and the fun shapes left from last year

Hydrangea Nikko Blue

hanging on the fence like a memory of old friends.

Still love my garden. It's time to break out the pruning shears and get to work.

And more good news about my newish Corolla, Bunny—he carried home a bare-root Brooks Plum yesterday with not so much as an ear waggle of complaint.