Harbingers of spring

TPP had the opportunity to have a walk around the gardens.  Signs of spring are everywhere.  The witch-hazel are flowering, as are the snowdrops.  Winter aconite is lifting its flowers and showing the bright yellow perianth, although it appears to be growing in a new location, so it seeded in or some new corms were planted and TPP doesn't remember.  Now let's check the date: Feb. 25th.  Yes, that's early, but witch-hazel has flowered earlier by a week or so on several occasions; this would set a new record for the winter aconite which has never flowered before March 5 before.  This is only about 3 days earlier for snowdrops.  No idea which of these harbingers is most reliable.  The buds are swelling on the silver maple trees, and the filbert pollen catkins have elongated.  Got a bit of snowy rain but nothing to really discourage these real early flowers.  Picked a couple of forsythia branches to see it we can force some early flowers.

Friday Fabulous Flower - snow drops

And second place goes to snow drops (Galanthus nivalis) just two days later than the witch hazels.  The fairly long snow cover of this winter always gets snow drops off to a fairly early start.  These little bulbs are not very flashy, but they sure are cheerful after a long winter.  If you have a garden you should stick in clumps of these bulbs just every where.  Clumps sometimes surprise us arising in places where they planted themselves.  This clump only started as one or two stalks, and now it consists of a couple of dozen bulbs.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - dwarf daffodils

They are just so darned cute!  Just like the kittens of the spring gardens.  This particular daffodil or narcissus is only about 5-6" tall, but any variety under 10" is sort of a miniature.  Here's a link to several varieties of these little ones.  These (tete-a-tete) flower at about the same time as my earliest standard daffodils, but they make thick foot wide clusters in just a few years producing a large number of flowers.  You got to have these in the front of your garden beds.  Basically trouble free.  TPP is early this week because field work tomorrow.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Tough guy edition

As is not the least bit unusual, a prolonged and very early spring has been punctuated by a blast of cold weather and snow.  And this may not even be the only punctuation! The quite mild weather of late Feb. and early March persuaded many plants to break their winter dormancy, during which they are quite cold hardy, and commence growth producing tissues and flowers which are much less cold hardy.  During this cold snap the night time temperatures have dipped some 22 degrees (F) below freezing. Based on long experience, most of our cold hardy plants will survive even if damaged, but a few really tough plants simply shrug off these freezes.  Today's FFF is a hellebore (Helleborus), a well known genus of tough plants in the buttercup family.  Once they get established (they often take their time and need some TLC to get established) the plants deal with shade pretty well, their tough, dark-green, animal-resistant foliage will persist through the winter, and they produce large blooms quite early in the spring.  Hellebores are a great plant in many of our gardens, although for a couple of decades falling into gardening obscurity, a trend recently reversed by many new varieties with more bloom colors.  The image shows a cluster of blooms as they emerge from the snow, totally undamaged.  Some larger, taller hybrid varieties were cut and have persisted pleasantly in a vase on our kitchen table for 10 days now.  You really can't ask for more. These flowers are much better known in Europe than here in the states. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Purple fumewort

Whenever the Phactors find some new plant it gets tested to see if it will survive under conditions of benign neglect.  Newly planted trees and shrubs are the only things that get TLC.  So it's always nice when some attractive, and even delicate looking new comer proves to be hardy and tough. A number of years ago Mrs. Phactor got Cordylis lutea, as the name suggests a yellow-flowered fumewort, a group of annual to perennial herbs that used to be in their own family, the Fumariaceae. Now they are part of the poppy family to which they are quite similar. They are sort of like a bleeding heart if you only took one-half of the flower. The yellow cordylis starts flowering early and will continue until the frost kills them back.  They have a tendency to weediness, but not so badly that you decide to nuke them.  A couple of other species have been tried unsuccessfully, but Cordylis solida, a blue-purple flowered species, more of a spring-flowering then die-back species, has proven pretty tough growing in three different beds and not showing any bad habits yet. It's quite cheerful as a low-growing edge of a bed plant that doesn't seem particularly palatable to the bun-buns. It may look delicate, but it's tough, quite frost hardy, which is important in our climate of highly changeable spring weather.

I'm dreaming of spring bulbs for Christmas

It's 61 degrees outside after a morning of thunderstorms that dumped a couple of inches of rain on us. Not only isn't this going to be a white Christmas, but spring bulbs: scilla, snow drops, daffodils, and spring beauty shoots are appearing all over the place.  Helleborus niger flower buds are showing and Helleborus foetidus is flowering. TPP is surprised witchhazel isn't in flower.  For two people who grew up in the snowbelt this is pretty unusual, but it's unusually warm across the whole eastern half of North America.
The Phactors got an alumni newletter the other day from Oswego State on the east end of Lake Ontario, and it listed the 10 biggest snow accumulation school years and Mrs. Phactor was there for two of the top 10 '69-'70 and '70-'71.  Around 230" of snow each year.  In '66-'67 TPP witnessed their largest single event snowfall, 102" in 32 hours!!!  Hard to imagine isn't it?  But both of us grew up in places that got 100-150" of snow a year, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
But the Phactors have gotten older and softer, so not sure how to handle that much snow any more. Glugwine and a fire place sounds about right.  Mostly the spring plants will be OK especially if some snow finally provides some protection.
Oh, now the weather says expect winds up to 50 mph! At least the snow won't be drifting.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Blue lawn addendum

OK, who hit the publish button on the FFF blog on Thursday?  Dang, no one else to blame, but my dear readers you will get another installment of blue as a result. While strolling through our blue lawn (Scilla version), someone wanted to know how many plants a blue lawn takes. Well, who knows, thousands and thousands; they been out there reproducing for a long time. So you sort of get used to them everywhere, and then one catches your eye, and TPP said, "That one is different." Closer inspection, i.e., get down to their level, revealed that TPP's sharp botanical eye has not dimmed in the least because indeed, among the many Scilla, was still another genus that is also bright blue, Chionodoxa, glory of the snow.  This genus is (or was, the former lily family has been in upheaval.) placed close to Scilla, but they are pretty easy to tell apart.  Not having planted this volunteer, an unconscious gift from some neighbor, the species is uncertain, C. forbesii perhaps, a common cultivar. As can be seen the petals are also bright blue, but some cultivars can be nearly white or purple. Here's the easiest difference; Chionodoxa has dilated stamen filaments, meaning flat, standing side by side making the center of the flowers white.  The flowers also turn upward more, while the flowers of Scilla nod. Glory-of-the-snow can be pretty plentiful, but they never quite get as crowded as squill. And no, TPP isn't checking all the others.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Light blue lawns

Unlike in the burbs, the Phactors live in a historic district with old houses and old lawns, owned by old people (actually only a few of us) and here abouts, old lawns sometimes means blue lawns, virtual carpets of Scilla (squill) appear in the early spring.  On a couple of previous years, TPP has treated you to views of our blue lawn (here and here).  Our lawn will reach peak blueness either today or tomorrow, but these blues are quite cheerful. Lawns get this way when these little bulbs continue to reproduce unchecked for decades.  A couple of yards away a neighbor has a light blue lawn, which is really quite novel because the bulb is much less well known and much less commonly planted, and of course, these were planted some decades ago too. This is the genus Pushkinia.  This genus is native to the Middle East and is named for a Russian botanist.  The common name, although you seldom see it, is striped squill because of the bluish tint on the whitish petals is more or less a stripe. Some of these grow in one of our lawns, but it remains predominately blue.  Pretty cheerful, don't you agree? And some people only have grass.

Springy things

It's about time that some springy things happened. A few clumps of snowdrops are now in flowering. Both early and standard crocus have begun flowering, which sort of belies the "early" concept, and the proof is right there, the bits of yellow petals left from the bunny breakfast. Scilla is also starting to flower, although full flowering will be a bit later when the thousands and thousands of them will turn the lawn blue. This is just great; Scilla is not liked by bunnies so naturally the number around would overwhelm, even satiate, those herbivores if only they liked them. Finally the witch hazel has flowered and the American filbert isn't far behind. The lily pond pump was turned on not so much for the cascade, but for the leaf skimmer to gather up all the leaves that are blowing in. Just like swallows returning to someplace, mallards return to our lily pond every spring. And weirdly enough, the mallards joined the squirrels and bunnies under the bird feeder. Well, it is a bird feeder.