I don’t believe in coincidences. It cannot be just chance that so many of our best backyard bird sightings happen on or the day before Mother’s Day. I’m convinced that these rare appearances are a gift from one mother to another, namely from Mother Nature to Judy.
This seems like a good time for a post devoted to miscellaneous development in the garden.
Let’s talk about spring-blooming native plants that like shade, specifically those that have been catching my eye lately in our garden. With one exception, these are all plants that Midwestern gardeners should be using a lot more.
Yesterday we were lucky enough to go on a tour of Lurie Garden’s spring bulb display with Jacqueline van der Kloet, who designed Lurie’s original bulb plantings in 2006. She’s in Chicago now to update those plantings, and will return in October to oversee the planting of thousands of new bulbs.
When we weren’t hiking, our friends drove us around so we could explore the Great Smoky Mountains National Park by car.
So we got back from Tennessee on Friday afternoon, and the garden welcomed us back with a fabulous show. However, the weather gods were preparing a more malicious welcome, namely the 3-5″ of snow predicted for the following day.
Multiple sources indicated that Hardwood Cove was one of the best short wildflower walks in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s just under a mile, and yet it took us over THREE HOURS to complete the hike.
So guess where we’ve been? Eastern Tennessee, that’s where, visiting friends. They picked us up at the Knoxville airport and whisked us off to the Great Smoky National Park, primarily so that we could enjoy the abundant wildflowers that bloom there at this time of year.
Our first day there we hiked the Schoolhouse Gap Trail. It’s a 4 mile wooded trail rated “easy”, but I will say that “easy” is in the eyes (or rather the knees) of the individual hiker.
Spring continues to make slow, if unsteady, progress (we got 3 inches of snow on Sunday, but it was gone by the following day). We have mostly shifted from the first to the second wave of flowering spring bulbs.
Last Friday I stopped to visit Springfield’s Lincoln Memorial Garden on my way out of town. It is one of the few gardens designed by Jens Jensen (a hero of mine) that still retains the essential elements of his plan, which included only plants native to Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky.
There was not much in bloom, though a lot of plants were on the brink. I decided to write a post anyway, taking inspiration from the blog New Hampshire Gardening Solutions. In that blog you can read some fascinating posts taken from walks in the woods where most of us would say there is nothing to see.
gardeninacity 