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.  

Water relief and toast

Hooray!  All of those burnt offerings paid off and the notoriously fickle Midwestern weather gods presented us with an inch of rain overnight.  Plants, even many of those that had shown no signs of wilting, definitely look perked up this morning.  Plants that still don't look good are now officially in the category of toast.  One was a new planting, a small conifer, that just declined from the time it was planted.  Another is a male holly bush.  It joins others on the toast list, a nearby yew, a large and ancient one, and a nearby redbud, large and ancient, the latter of which is so close to the neighbor's driveway that it has claimed several rear view mirrors of cars backing out.  This tree is now in the burnt toast category; if we'd known it would have been gone years ago.  Strangely from our perspective this redbud doesn't exist since is lines up with another redbud about 5 feet closer so it all looks like just one tree.  None of these hollies has done particularly well, none of them look very good either, which is another way of getting onto the toast list.  The latest were half a dozen dwarf mock orange shrubs.  They looked so cute in marketing pictures; ours never even came close to looking so good, so they got basally pruned.  Now if you lack a male holly for pollination, then one of the better features of the other hollies, red fruit, will shift from the positive to the negative side of the balance sheet.  The removal of the hollies, the yew, and the redbud will generate some considerable opportunity for new plantings.  Ahhh, you're taking out a redbud (someone always says that).  Well, there are probably another dozen or so around the garden, and yesterday TPP probably removed 50 more seedlings; a redbud removal is not a problem.