OMG—Oooooo, My Garden!

Rhododendron Cherry Float

I finished my early morning cleanup session today by taking a few more photos, and I feel like there really aren't any words for all this color. Or maybe I'm just tired. Anyway, here are my newly blooming treasures, young and old. I bought this rhodie seven years ago and this is the first year it's bloomed. It's a floppy one, thin branches and large flower clusters, but who cares when they're this rich?

Rhododendron Cherry Float

Here's another floppy one. This used to be my favorite, for the deep cerise color. Now I'm not sure any more. Not this year, anyway. But seeing all the upward facing shoots, I'm wondering, since it's all over the ground now, will it start growing up? Or is it convinced it's a ground cover?

Rhododendron (unk. var.)

This one's slighty less floppy and is this gorgeous peach color, which I've never seen anywhere else. This is one of my rhodies that gets direct afternoon sun, and the only one I've noticed Lace Bug damage on. Not too much, fortunately.

Peachy Rhododendron (unk. var.)

The baby flowers on my oldest Satomi, which I love from now till I eat the fruit. :-)

Cornus kousa Satomi

I finally got BIG snowballs this year! Softball sized! I love the hanging cluster. Wish I could tuck a little LED bulb inside each one. That would be cool.

Viburnum plicatum sp.

My geums made it through the winter in my worst, wettest clay so well that I bought six more, in two more colors, orange, and red.

Geum Alabama Slammer & forget-me-nots

Last but not least, I bought this clematis last summer at a hardware store for $5, when it had just a few of the inner petals left on one beat-up flower, just enough to convince me it was the lavender-blue the tag showed. I had my head down yesterday, pulling weeds and extra forget-me-nots, and I almost poked myself in the eye with these blooms. I had no idea it was blooming already and it surprised the heck out of me.

Clematis Multi-Blue

Garden full of rhodies

Two April Glows with a Flaming Silver Pieris in full new leaf inbetween

I pulled this photo out of my camera today and was really surprised to see how big my older rhodies look. Six inches a year does add up—after 8 years a 1-foot plant becomes a 5-foot plant. And when it's covered in big fat blooms, it looks even bigger. It makes my garden look like an amazing woodland fantasy. So I grabbed another photo of some almost-as-old rhodies from further down the hill and here it is—a half-grown rhodie garden that's so beautiful I can't believe it. Here's to a lovely spring, and having it come soon to everyone.

April Glow in front, and Cheer in back

The flowers are out, and so am I

One of the benches I never have time to sit on

It hit 68º this afternoon—far and away the warmest day we've had so far this year. And it was beautiful, calm, and quiet, and I spent a lot of it outside, working in the garden. Mostly I was weeding and doing cleanup, but I did a little bit of dancing—carefully, because I'm out of practice and I already bruised my heel the other day at a garden fair, stepping in a hole. I hope to really catch up this week, it's going to be dry all week, and after tomorrow, not windy. I have been getting out once in a while to take pictures as my spring flowers open, and I wanted to put them up here. My big red bicolor camellia (above and below) is always the first one in the back to flower, so I've been enjoying it for the last two weeks, and half a dozen other camellias are blooming now, along with a couple early big-leaf rhodies. I really love the tie-dye look of this bicolor.

Unnamed bicolor camellia

For the first year, I could actually see blossoms on my forsythia from my house! This is the third year for the Lynnwood Gold, and the fourth for the Meadowlark, and I could see them both. But the Lynwood Gold just happened to send an arching branch over the lavender flowers of my deciduous Rhododendron mucronulatum.

Lynwood Gold forsythia and R. mucronulatum

I've been pretty good about putting sluggo out this spring, so my primroses have been mostly happy and hole-free. I got a pair of this one a couple years ago, and it is one of my favorites. It's so bright. I hope I'll be able to divide this clump at some point—I'd love to have a whole row of them.

A two-tone primula

The last photo is of my biggest PJM rhodie, which is as tall as I am now. It's really beautiful this year, with more flowers than ever. Another Master Gardener friend was over the other day relieving me of about 200 one-gallon plastic pots for her garden club to use, and she said the azalea lacebugs got one of her PJM's so badly she had to take it out. The lacebugs poke thousands of holes in the leaves of azaleas and small-leaved rhodies and suck the fluids out, reducing the leaves to—yep—lace. They hit a number of my azaleas pretty hard last year but didn't kill any of them, so I'm hoping the plants will start developing some defenses to them this year. I don't use insecticides on my plants, just on my house, so trying to keep my plants from being stressed in any other ways is my only strategy. That means, no more sun than they like, and keeping them well watered this summer. Rumor has it that it will be a hot summer, so I'll have to work at that a bit.

PJM Rhodie behind Siberian Iris  and Midwinter Fire dogwood

So it was a great start to my gardening year today, on probably the warmest day till next week. Lovely, lovely, lovely.

Enjoying My Garden Treasures

Twin purple rhodies

While it was dry—which was lovely, if a bit worrisome due to the lack of rain—I spent a few mornings out in the garden with my camera, really enjoying having so many beautiful flowers. Every spring the show gets better as the plants grow larger and more beautiful, and are able to make more blooms. I love doing the work of gardening, I love finding and buying the plants, creating the garden, and taking care of the plants, but having them do well and start showing off is like opening presents someone else made for you with magic.

Now that it's raining, I'm inside again, playing with the photographs. Several of them are so pretty I decided to put them up for sale on my art site. If I had any room on my walls, I'd make posters of them and put them up myself. I did order myself a t-shirt with this beauty on it:

Big purple rhodie bud about to unfurl

Some other favorites:

Clematis Asao buds opening

Columbine (Aquilegia) naturalized seedling