It finally feels like a real Bloom Day! In the garden there are of course Canadian columbines (Aquilegia canadensis)...
...including this one that is a seedling I planted last year. So far it's my first seedling to flower!
The peonies and bearded irises are just waiting to explode. Cool, rainy weather lately has stalled some blooming around here.
The salvia is just beginning to bloom. 'Plumosa' is still only in bud.
Even the chives are looking lovely...
In the shady part of the front garden, yellow pimpernel (Taenidia integerrima) is doing wonderfully. It's the little puffs of gold you see here.
Those enormous leaves are actually the aptly named big-leaved aster (Eurybia macrophylla). It appears to be swallowing the Taenidia, but I assure the Taenidia is in no real danger.
(Conspicuously absent from this area are my Jacob's Ladders [Polemonium reptans] which I'm not even sure survived the winter.)
OK, so this little woodland area is doing quite well with shooting stars, lily of the valley and the Taenidias, but thanks to wind and a deluge of maple seeds, this picture does not do it justice.
That little blur in the foreground is a happily blooming 'Cascade Creeper' tiarella that I was sure would not make it this year. It was so dried out and sad last fall I figured it was a goner for sure. Now (although you can't tell from the picture) it's blooming, growing new foliage, and generally loving life near the Japanese painted fern and astilbe.
Golden alexanders (Zizia aurea)are the stars of the garden right now. These ones are in the sunny corner at the end of the front garden. Please excuse the harsh afternoon light and shadows. I pretty much broke every photography rule of thumb on this post!
Here are the very happy, very large golden alexanders in the rain garden, along with porcupine sedges (Carex hystericina) and owl-fruit sedges (Carex stipata) that are "blooming." Like grasses, sedges have inflorescences that contain flower parts but don't look like blossoming petals and all that.
Those blurry pink things are coral bells (Heuchera sanguinia), which are currently my only heucheras in bloom. The native alumroots nearby (H. richardsonii) are starting to send up some tentative flower stalks. Here you also see the lily of the valley that has crept under my neighbor's fence. Since this is a relatively new border I'm tolerating the invasion because I need the plants.
Due to wind I could only get a close up of this wild hyacinth (Camassia scilloides).
It's lovely by itself, but they're even better en masse. I have eight of them starting to bloom in the new southern border, but alas the weather would not cooperate for me to show them all to you.
My prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) are growing very slowly this spring after being planted last fall (in that whole sleep, creep, leap progression we're somewhere between sleeping and creeping). So there is just this one measly bud...
...and that completes this Bloom Day post! Check out May Dreams Garden where Carol graciously hosts Bloom Day and you can find out what's blooming everywhere!
4 comments:
Such wonderful wild things you have in your garden Rose! I love the zizia and shooting stars especially.
Isn't May wonderful? You have so much blooming already. I remember seeing the Golden Alexanders at the Chicago Botanic Garden last year, my first introduction to them. They're going to make a spectacular border for you. And hooray for the tiarella! I thought I had lost my one and only tiarella, too, but I spied one little bloom hiding behind some heucheras the other day so they must be hardier than I thought.
Your garden looks lovely now. The columbines are just wonderful. I seem unable to grow Camassia, so it's good to see it happily growing in your garden. I'm happy for you that the Geum survived the winter. They are a little slow to get started, but it'll be fine.
I really like that lovely wild hyacinth. I wonder if I can grow it? I can't wait to see all those peonies and irises in bloom. Will they bloom at the same time? If so, wow!
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