TGIF - 4 March

It's a wonderful day for early March. Winter is sputtering out and the spring awakening has begun.  So today is the official start of the garden margarita season.  Make yourself a cocktail, take it outside into your garden, sit in the sun, and then imagine how things are going to look this year. Think about what you will plant to replace the arborvitaes that got smashed like a bug by a huge tulip tree branch that broke during an ice storm.  And feel fortunate that your Sinocalycanthus seeding has not only survived it's 2nd winter, but narrowly escaped the afore-mentioned smashing.  It was a surprisingly busy week, helped two different sets of people prepare for a visit to a tropical field station in Costa Rica.  Worked on fiscal development for the Botanical Society of America. Made a really good hot kumquat-mango salsa for an herb-roasted pork loin for dinner. Got our garden flowering log more or less in working order.  According to the list, there are 88 species of Illinois native plants in our gardens, almost one-third, but not counting ferns or gymnosperms yet. Somehow managed to not record two years of flowering for our many red-buds.  How did that happen?  Probably not enough margaritas. Let's go fix that problem.