Friday Fabulous Flower

It was a bit warmer yesterday, back to brisk today, but enough to give a few more of these terribly cute Iris (I. reticulata) a chance to flower.  Their flower is pretty large in comparison to the size of the plants, although the leaves will get longer and taller.  This is a species that would like being in a sunny rock garden, which TPP does not have, but in one bed this bulb-forming Iris has been happy. This is a very cheerful spring flower if you can make it happy.  In 3 or 4 other places in our gardens it has just faded away.  This species has been a FFF before, but not too many other choices right now, and if enjoyable each spring, then no problem featuring it again.

Grade exams or plant bulbs

This is not really much of a choice, but actually both have to be done.  The end of daylight savings time has provided the false sense of having some time to think about this.  The main problem with exams is that after all these years, how they are going to come out is pretty obvious.  The inattentive, the frequently absent, the crammers, the poorly disciplined, often all combined in a single person, don't really have a chance of doing well, but it still saddens TPP to be right so often although this is never known until the exams are graded.  Self-fulfilling prophecies are not allowed, so grading is done in the blind.  Yesterday was a damp cold day, and the reaction is almost always the same; cook something satisfyingly spicy, in this instance mulligatawny soup.  My version is a bit spicier than most because a home made garam masala is used in place of curry powder, and to cook the chicken and make the broth, a nice hot pimento pepper is used along with a clove studded onion.  Oh yes, quite yum, and then later to Hyde Park.  No actually later to see Argo, a quite tense, quite good movie actually, and then cocktails with friends.  Today promises to be a bit warmer, so finishing the bulb planting is almost a must do chore, as is the bloody exam grading.  What's the solution, why cook something else satisfyingly spicy for Sunday supper rather than deal with dirty exams, or dirt and exams.

Uh oh! Honey dew weekend!

This is not a good sign.  Mrs. Phactor is on the patio and the table is covered with various bags and boxes of bulbs.  In the spring bulbs are great; in the fall they make my back ache because they need to be planted.  The first couple of hundred go OK, but then it gets to be work.  A 3-year plan to eradicate lily of the valley under a big burr oak and plant a sward of English bluebells is in it's final year.  This will be a tiny version of the planting in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that inspired this action, fall out of Botanical Geek Tour #1.  So if TPP spends too long with this blog things will begin to get ugly.  Last weekend the monsterous elephant ears by the pond were dug, and now it looks funny because those huge leaves, over 6 foot tall, made such a presence, now some new perennials will be planted.  A bed of tall, purple leafed cannas must be dug so a couple of hundred tulip bulbs can be planted.  While the weather has been very much fallish for three weeks now, cool at night, flirting with frost but not quite getting there, so the cannas still stand tall, so that means some massive rhizomes are anchoring the whole bed.  At any rate somewhere there's a shovel with my name on it.  And come spring, today's work will look wonderful.  And mocking me from the adjacent kitchen chair, one of the kittygirls is looking quite smuggly comfortable. Unfortunately the weather is iffy and rain threatens to change our plans.  So if it rains Mrs. Phactor will probably want to go and buy more bulbs. 

Oh, yes, a reminder!

Maybe the memory isn't what it used to be, because somehow last fall the Phactor made an unplanned purchase of some spring bulbs on sale, and then had Mrs. Phactor yammering on about who (duh!) was going to plant them and where they were to be planted, and so being smallish, they were stuck into the margins of little gardens, here and there, and then promptly forgotten until the shoots popped up this spring.  And do you think there was any memory of what kind of bulb they were, or any notes about where all they had been planted?  Nope.  But the nice thing then is you get a surprise when they flower and you get your answer, which is Iris reticulata, a very cheerful spring flower.  Now the remaining surprise will be to see where all they appear.  Spring, when things lost are found, but a big pair of loppers are still missing.  Gone. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Foxtail Lily

This was quite a surprise. Last year we got this bulb, and up came some leaves and they died down pretty quickly, so either dormant or permanently dormant, and then we planted this new ornamental pine right next to that location having completely forgotten about the bulb, and so it was a surprise when up came quite a whorl of leaves followed by three nice big inflorescences of this foxtail lily (Eremurus) and it's quite a floral display. Maybe some more of these will have to be added to the garden.