Only a few weeks ago I was complaining about how our ‘Schubert’ Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) had never bloomed, and now – it’s blooming! I guess patience has been rewarded, since this tree was planted 6 years ago as a bareroot whip less than 3′ tall (it’s now about 15′).
I wanted to do just a quick post on the ‘Donald Wyman’ crab blooming now in our Front Garden. For me, the flowering of this tree is one of the most joyous moments defining spring in our garden. For the last two years in a row the bloom has been unusually prolific.
Maybe the title is a little misleading. It’s not that we don’t have a bunch of beautiful tulips. It’s just that we don’t have as many as I feel we ought to have.
On Friday Judy and I visited the Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG); it’s been a great place to visit since the pandemic struck. Since last June, CBG has been open to the public on a time-reserved basis. Getting our entrance passes online has been easy each time we’ve tried it. Here’s a link from our first visit to CBG after the reopening last year.
When neighbors plant a new tree on their side of the property line, it feels to me like I’ve got a new tree of my very own. In this case the tree is a Yoshino Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis), and its first season of profuse bloom is happening right now.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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