Friday Fabulous Flowers - spring color and texture

Gardens change. Basal pruning (removal) of a row of old scraggly spruce trees covering a large, old hosta bed (of very low diversity) produced a huge opportunity for change, like 75 feet of garden along our front sidewalk.  So a lot of old hostas (maybe half of the several hundred) got moved and given away, and an array of flowering shrubs and ornamental trees took their places. It's made for quite a sward of colors and textures in the spring. 
So here's a 60 or-so-foot view looking over several Fothergillas, a deeply-lilac lilac, a quite orange azalea (Spicy Lights) not quite in full bloom, and a purple-leafed Japanese maple in the distance anchoring the far end. A nearly finished flowering June berry and a not in flower yet double-file viburnum barely show over the azalea. Other shrubs and flowers are too short.   

Garden color palate of mid-April

A lot of plants are in flower right now across a range of colors. A couple of pearl bushes (Exochorda), still on the smallish side (garden age - 3 yrs), add big splashes of white (above). A dozen or so redbuds spread a lacy pink-purple around our gardens aided a bit by flowering crabapples. A Carolina silverbell (Halesia) suddenly showed up (it's flowers start green and turn white) its lacy display out beyond the perennial bed. An orange spicy-lights Azalea is beginning to turn up the heat. Bluebells, poppies, tulips and late narcissas provide lots of accents. All of this as the magnolias fade. 
Wait! A blond fox squirrel just arrived. Just a couple of blocks from our gardens is a population of black fox squirrels, but the blond one is a new comer. Just what we need, immigrants.
 In the spring things just pop up it seems, but a couple of replacement arbor-vitae trees were planted yesterday in TPP's absence (8 footers), so they really did pop up! Wished they had popped straight up (planted with a bit of tilt)(Yes, fussy, but that was paid-for planting.) And so a border garden reappears.  It's a bit sad, but the lawn needs to be mowed; while shaggy, the violets and spring beauty are nice, and it has a nice meadow quality to it. Basically mowing lawns is like poodle pruning shrubs.