It’s easy to love the woodland spring ephemeral flowers – the Bluebells, Bloodroots, Bluets, and Trilliums. But what about plants that persist in the shade after the ephemerals are gone?
gardeninacity
Notes from a wildlife-friendly cottage garden
How can you not love Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica)? They are coming into their own in our garden right now. The clusters of soft blue tubular flowers are fantastic, especially combined with the pink and purple buds.
Share this:
Sure there are lots of red tulips to choose from, but here are four reasons you may want to plant the species Tulip, Tulipa praestans.
Share this:
Spring is progressing rapidly, I sometimes feel a bit too fast. Still, it can be downright exhilarating. While many of the Daffodils in the Back Garden have already gone to seed, we are now enjoying a second round of Daffodil blooms, concentrated in the Front Garden.
Share this:
The Tulip From Turkestan
After Tulipa kaufmanniana ‘Early Harvest’, the first Tulip to bloom in our garden is T. turkestanica. T. turkestanica is a wild or Species Tulip, whose native range covers rocky hillsides and river valleys extending from Iran through Central Asia and into China’s Uighur region – the origin land of many Tulips. T. kaufmanniana also started as a wild Tulip from Central Asia but for some reason is generally not classified as a Species Tulip.
T. turkestanica has white flowers with orange-yellow centers. The flowers are star-shaped with 6 points, smaller than those of hybrid Tulips. The flowers will open only in sunny weather. The leaves are also interesting: long, wavy, and grey-green.
Share this:
This is going to be a short post because we have our son David his partner Meridith visiting from Minnesota this week. So I just want to show you what I think of as our garden’s first wave of Daffodils.
Share this:
When we put in the new driveway the narrow strip of lawn bordering the Left Bank Bed became even narrower. So naturally, I decided to dig it up. The new garden space was filled, among other things, with Glory-of-the-Snow (Scilla forbesii, formerly Chionodoxa forbesii).
Share this:
It’s nice that’s it’s officially spring and all, but many of us are asking: when will the Tulips bloom?
Share this:
If you are thinking about adding Coneflowers (Echinacea sp. and cvs.) to your garden this spring, you might want to look at a recent report put out by the Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware. The Center has done extensive research with an eye to promoting the use of native plant varieties in American home gardens. Their evaluation of several dozen Coneflower species and cultivars is available online. The evaluation, conducted in 2019 and 2020, looked at each plant’s ability to attract pollinators as well as its horticultural performance.
Share this:
It is now officially spring, snow has melted, buds are budding, and it seems like a good time for an overview of recent developments.
So most of the garden still looks like this, but there are green bits emerging and even a few flowers.
Share this:
