The Flowerbed in Front of our House

It has been so rainy that I haven’t been able to do much work in the flower beds around our house. In the front, the growth is luxuriant. The chives seem to be growing faster than I can harvest them to add to salads. Yesterday I added a handful of chopped chives (flowers and all) to pureed hardboiled egg and hummus. I spread it in a pita and used the leftover as a ‘dip’ for celery sticks and carrot chips. Yum!

All around the chives, the day lilies are everywhere and the deer have not bothered them like they have in the past few years (eating the leaves down to the ground as fast as they grew). Hopefully with all the other food this spring, the deer will leave the lilies along. Comin up next to the downspout from the gutter are two milkweed plants. They are weeds – but I’m going to let them grow and hope that some monarch butterflies visit our garden to lay their eggs.

Do you see the tulip poplar seedling? That is something I need to pull before it gets any bigger. The daylilies and Black Eyed Susans will stay.

And then there are the irises – just beginning to bloom. Some of the buds look like they got waterlogged or too cold and are not developing further. But the plants that are blooming are gorgeous as usual. I like them even more because the largest grouping of irises is visible from the skinny windows that frame our front door.

On the other side of the front – there is another milkweed growing in a bed that is being overrun by grass. Some focused pulling needs to happen all around it and the young nine-bark bush we planted a year ago.

The front of the house looks very green – and will look even better as soon as I am home on a sunny day and spend the time to do a bit of clean up and out in the front flowerbed!

The best of the rest of Brookside

There was a lot more than fiddleheads, azaleas and goslings at Brookside Gardens last week….so this post is a ‘best of the rest’ from my collection of pictures.

The Red Buckeye near the conservatory parking lot was blooming.

I’d never looked at the flower up close before. I looked it up and discovered that it is closely related to the horse chestnut.

The jack-in-the-pulpits were coming up. These are flowers that one has to be looking for to spot although these striped ones are pretty distinctive.

Many times the leaves and the flowers are almost the same color.

The dogwoods were blooming too. Depending where they are in the garden they can be still green in the center

Or already yellow.

And there are some that are very different – from Asia rather than our native variety of dogwood.

There as a chipmunk sorting through the debris in a concrete culvert – finding seeds.

The area of the gardens that has been ‘under construction’ for the past few years was open and there were yellow irises around the pond,

A newly planted magnolia with large leaves and mature blooms, and

A robust stand of horsetails.

I noticed a bench that evidently is not used often ... judging from the plants growing around it.

I’d never noticed how the bark of this Hawthorne wrinkled as the branches flared out from the trunk!

Even the pines have interesting features in the spring.

It’s a great time of year to take a closer look at the garden!