Friday Fabulous Flower - a species tulip

Finally had a break in the cold, dreary weather.  Now things held back are flowering at a pace TPP cannot keep up with.  This particular tulip burst into flower with the first dose of sun and warmth.  It's a species tulip, not some horticultural variety or hybrid.  As best TPP can determine this is Tulipa urumiensis, probably native to Turkey or Iran, an area of high diversity in this genus.  The uncertainty arises when you buy packs of mixed species for fun.  This particular species naturalizes pretty easily and its quite attractive, a bright, cheerful, somewhat fragrant, reminder of spring, in the middle east.  The only downside is that the flowers only open when the sun is shining on them.  

Monday, Monday

It would have to be a Monday.  It snowed last night about an inch; not enough to bury or hide the blue lawn completely.  And of course it's still cold.  The whole thing is pretty depressing.  Still have lots of leaves to remove from beds and the bases of shrubs and perennials, but don't want to uncover the new shoots too soon.  The delayed spring results in forced inactivity, and that is also sort of depressing.  A series of emails about kapok reminded TPP of the tropics, and how different it is in tropical places & a certain longing for the tropics looms up, and you want to go.  Fortunately this snow is almost gone already, and a 70 high is predicted in just a few days.  Or is it just a setup for another weather disappointment?   No choice but to wait & see.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Tough little guys

This long cold spring had better make a turn for the better soon.  TPP estimates that flowering dates are now delayed nearly two weeks from average dates.  It was really cold last night, a good night for having beer & pizza with friends in a little old Italian bar/restaurant.  But TPP is getting seriously depressed about spring.  Today's FFF are tough little guys that handle snow and quite cold night time lows without showing any damage.  And are these cheerful enough for you?  This is one of the dwarf daffodil varieties, standing only 5-6 inches tall.  They form large dense clumps that just beg you to divide them after a few years.  They produce a lot of flowers and make a great low growing front border.  Right now this is just about all our gardens have going on.  They are also a nice contrast to the blue of the squills.  

Black wildlife

After years of observation, you don't figure to see too many things that are new in your gardens.  Then who shows up at your squirrel feeding station?  A black squirrel, more correctly a melanistic squirrel.  TPP doesn't know the genetics of melanism in squirrels, but no question this one is black.  More or less regular colored fox squirrel is shown for the contrast.  All are in training for the fattest squirrel competition. A few years back we had some pale squirrels around with white or nearly white bellies, but they did not persist in the population.    

Different names means they are different. Take a look.

While walking through our gardens, the F1 asked a good botanical question.  Is that just a pale squill or is it something different?  The answer is actually it was just a pale squill, but in another part of the gardens there is another species that looks superficially like a pale squill.  Here they are together.  The pale squill looks just like regular squill except it is a  nearly white pale blue. What you see here is Scilla siberica (left) and Pushkinia scilloides (right). The flower sizes are similar especially when newly opened, and the coloring along the midvein of the showy perianth (petals) parts is darker.
The squill perianth opens more widely.  The Pushkinia stays more bell shaped.  Flipping them over shows a lot more differences.  The squill has longer stamen filaments and blue anthers, and usually only 1 or 2 flowers per stalk.  The Pushkinia has shorter, flattened filaments fused into a column with yellow anthers on the inner surface surrounding a smaller pistil, and usually more than 2 flowers per stalk.  Now to make matters slightly more complicated, your lawn might also have (TPP doesn't, but his previous lawn did.) Chionodoxa, glory of the snow, concurrently flowering as well.  Its flowers are also blue, but tend to be slightly bigger, to face more upwards, and to have  lighter-colored centers.  Both can naturalize and spread across your lawn.

Peak blue becoming white

Wow, not only is peak blue late this year, but even then in total defiance of Eostra's influence, peak blue is being whitened.  What a difference a day makes when it comes to weather in these parts.  To the best of our knowledge Peak Blue has never been snowed on before.  It must be because of the French-Canadian is here.  Compare with this image from TPP's most recent peak blue post just one day ago from as close to the same place as is possible.  Mrs. Phactor has declared this downright depressing.

Eostre on April 1st.

Eostre is an ancient goddess of spring, and because of some weird dating mechanism based on a lunar calendar, this year the religious holiday superimposed upon this honorable pagan celebration occurs on April 1st, which is often called April Fools Day, a widely disliked display of foolishness.  The religious holiday has no significance for this writer, and it wasn't something that was part of mix of messages, and it was more like Mother Nature was playing an April 1st joke on all of us.  TPP always looks forward to spring, and usually by this time 30 to 40 plants in our gardens have commenced blooming (or even come and gone).  This year, 2018, only 17 plants have started flowering, and three of these events were recorded yesterday on 31 March.  And today will be a sort of joke about spring because it is cold and tonight the temperature may be cold enough to be damaging  to even quite hardy plants.  This morning in the local newspaper an article about houseplants quoted a  horticulturalist as saying "the mental health benefits of plants are obvious."  TPP would concur, growing plants is highly therapeutic, and TPP can think of no person he deeply dislikes who also grows plants, and some of the worst would have to be coached "green side up" if they were laying sod.  So today's weather, and its impact on TPP's plants is rather depressing.  So come on Eostre, some fancy bourbon has been sacrificed (spilt) in your honor, and yet we get more cold, and even snow is possible.  OK TPP admits that the upper Midwest's weather may be beyond the abilities of an ancient goddess (but it was well-aged bourbon).  At any rate let's get this last gasp of winter over with.   TPP will attempt to cheer himself and others around him by cooking something semitropical and warming.  Maybe even indulging in a rum-based cocktail.

Peak Blueness is Late

If you search on "blue lawn", you will find a series of TPP posts on our blue spring lawn, which  is pretty spectacular and locally known.  This year is easily a week later than usual and as the temperature is predicted to get quite low tomorrow night it might be a bit short-lived too.  Many decades ago, someone planted Scilla siberica and they multiplied and prospered. Now there are thousands that have taken over portions of our lawn, as the image demonstrates, and it you don't mind waiting until they die down before mowing to avoid transforming the leaves into green slime, they are a great spring feature. How cheerful is that. Watch where you walk please.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Dendrobium

Spring is slowly coming along outside and most of our houseplant orchids are in flower.  After being outside until the cool fall, the combination of day length and temperature just prompts them all to flower.  This is a Dendrobium, a bamboo orchid, probably D. anosmum, but when a genus has more than 1000 species, and many are in cultivation, not to mention hybrids, a plant of uncertain parentage just gets an educated guess.  Flowering occurs along the old stems that sort of cascade from their hanging basket, so the floral display is pretty large, the flowers are large, 3" across, and a couple of dozen flowers is not unusual.  Unfortunately these won't last as long as some orchid flowers.  You can sort of see that they are rather thin and delicate, almost membranous, so a real annual treat.   

Friday Fabulous Flower - out of sync spring weather & hellebores

Somehow Friday, Sat. & Sunday got away from TPP.  Friday was pretty springy and TPP even planted some parsley seedlings, and luckily put them under some protection.  Saturday was a horrible weather day, starting with sleety rain, that turned to snow, heavy wet snow, and then finally to some substantially heavy snow.  Oh, TPP has seen & experienced much worse, but for this area this was impressive and thankfully brief, but still the storm put a good 6 inches on the ground.  TPP's first thought was swell, this cleanup job can wait a couple of days and warmer weather will remove the snow, but people were coming to din-dins, so sidewalks and drive needed some clearing.  An overwhelmed little snow thrower actually helped move most of the lighter snow that was sitting atop the base of icy slush, that froze once exposed.  Fortunately TPP had some experienced help, a French Canadian guest, who while now living outside the reach of the snow gods, still remembered how to shovel.  Some of the things in bloom will probably have gotten crushed by the heavy precip.  but fully expect the extremely tough hellebores to take this in stride. Although they may be a bit more noddy than usual. One problem with the common hybrid hellebores is that they tend to hold their flowers in a nodding or pendent position and the heavy slush may push them down further.  So here's what hellebores looked like before getting smushed under slush. The cold & snow won't bother them.