My crown for June 5th was simple and a little bride-like – or so my friends told me. It consists of two flowers only: palest-pink beautybush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) and azalea ‘White Cascade’ (Rhododendron hybrid).
The Japanese have a special word for the view in the distance, the landscape framed by your property, the elements that exist outside your own space: they call it shakkei. For most of us, our borrowed scenery is not a distant mountain range or a bucolic meadow rolling to the ocean, but the plants and trees growing in properties adjacent to our own gardens.
My shakkei is a pair of large beautybushes (Kolkwizia amabilis) belonging to my neighbour Claudette that cascade over my own fence and dominate the view along my side garden path, sometimes in late May but usually in early-mid June.
I thought Claudette — my neighbour for 39 years and a former French teacher — should be photographed for this blog with one of the progeny of her original shrub, and she kindly obliged. Merci beaucoups, madame.
Beautybush is often called ‘old-fashioned’ but I rarely see it in residential gardens, or botanical gardens, for that matter, which is a shame because it is a majestic shrub in bloom. A member of the honeysuckle family and a cousin to weigela, it typically grows to 10 feet tall (3 m) with a vase-shaped, arching habit that you can see in my photos. Here it is in my friend Rob Proctor’s fabulous garden in Denver, which I blogged about a few years ago.
I love the story of the 1901 discovery of Kolkwitzia amabilis by legendary plant explorer Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson (1876-1930) while collecting in the mountains of Hubei, China for Veitch’s Nursery of England. The shrub was about 5 feet tall and out of bloom, though he recorded in his notes that it had spinose fruits. He collected seeds which Veitch’s grew on until, six years later, small plants labeled as “Abelia” were sent to Boston’s Arnold Arboretum where Wilson had been employed. Finally, in June 1915 the shrubs flowered for the first time. According to a story in Arnoldia, the Arboretum’s newsletter, “Their early-summer displays of pink blossoms, profusely borne on arching branches, so impressed Wilson and others that it was christened beautybush.”
Photo courtesy of Arnold Arboretum – Copyright President & Fellows of Harvard College-Arnold Arboretum Archives.
Seeing it in Claudette’s garden in full flower with swallowtail butterflies…
…..and bumble bees competing to forage in the pale-pink blossoms flecked with amber nectar guides, I cannot help agreeing with its discoverer.
Here’s a little video I made of insects enjoying the flowers:
And though I wouldn’t consider it a prime candidate for floral design, here’s a very tiny bouquet that shows the inner markings of the corolla.
Much of my love of gardening came from watching my mother tend her garden in the suburbs of Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada’s mild ‘banana belt’. She grew camellias, magnolias, flowering cherries and a collection of brilliantly-colored Japanese azaleas – and I was her willing student. Though I garden in a much colder climate, in her honor I planted the ultra-hardy ‘Cascade’ azaleas (Rhododendron ‘Cascade’) beneath my sundeck. It is the sole survivor of many rhododendrons I planted over the decades, most of which eventually succumbed to imperfect conditions or summer drought. But ‘Cascade’ kept ticking along, and is an important color component of this little white-and-green-hued area, along with old-fashioned, white-edged Hosta undulata var. albo-marginata.
Here it is with my romping Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) peeking through the flowers.
My crown for May 31st wafted its fragrance around my head and made me wish I could bottle its sweet perfume. That would be the scent of the Meyer lilac (Syringa pubescens ‘Palibin’) that I planted in my fragrance garden long ago. The white flowers are from my big alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternifolia), an Ontario native shrub. And the fluffy spheres are an ornamental onion, Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’.
Much of the joy of lilac time is that it only lasts a week or so – if you just grown one type – so I’ve learned to savour that scent on the air or in a vase on my kitchen table, along with dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis).
Unlike the towering common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) which, if left unpruned, grows so tall that it flowers out of nose range, my Palibin dwarf lilac is just the right height to sniff at 5-6 feet (1.5-1.8 m) and a little wider. Some people grow it as a tightly-clipped hedge, but I prefer to let it have its natural shape.
True, it has a light scent, not the old-fashioned perfume of the Hyacinthiflora hybrids or common lilac, but it is nonetheless an ultra-hardy and low-maintenance fixture in my fragrance garden, and swallowtail butterflies enjoy nectaring on the tiny florets.
Its ancestor was found as a cultivated plant grafted on privet roots near Beijing, China in 1908 by Frank Meyer, who brought it to the U.S. It was named in his honour, Syringa meyeri, before being reclassified as Syringa pubescens subsp. pubescens ‘Palibin’. (Despite the fact that it was never found in Korea, it is often confused in the trade with the Korean lilac species, S. patula and its cultivar ‘Miss Kim’, as well as littleleaf lilac, S. microphylla.)
No such taxonomic confusion surrounds one of my favourite garden plants, the alternate-leafed dogwood (Cornus alternifolia). Native to a large swath of northeast North America, it is sometimes called pagoda dogwood for its layered branching. It occupies a corner of my garden that sits just a few inches lower than the rest of the back yard, and appreciates the extra moisture there. It is approximately 18 feet (5.5 m) tall and almost as wide.
It derives its Latin and common names from the fact that, unlike other dogwoods, the leaves are arranged alternately, rather than opposite. Some people refer to it as “pagoda dogwood” for its layered branching.
When it blooms in late May or early June, it is completely covered with creamy-white clusters of tiny flowers that attract native bees. I now have a few offspring of my original shrub seeded throughout my garden, which fills me with joy. And this morning I noticed the familiar flowers reaching over the fence from my next-door neighbours’ yard. I’m not sure they’ll know it was a gift from me, but it seems that my dogwood is intent on taking back native habitat from boring back yards! Hurrah!
In late summer, birds and squirrels make quick work of the blue fruit clusters….
….. and in October, the foliage turns a lovely rose suffused with gold.
Then there are the alliums, or ornamental onions. When I first planted Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ a few decades ago, I didn’t expect that it would be quite so exuberantly happy in my garden. Translated, that means it seeds itself around vigorously, especially in spots that dry out in summertime.
The good news: the bees love the violet-purple globes on 3-foot (90 cm) stems; the bad news: the plants look seriously ugly as the leaves turn yellow.
Rather than let them grow in a thicket, like I do in places, the best approach is to intersperse them among herbaceous plants, such as Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum), below, with old fashioned dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis). The latter is a biennial that took decades to creep under the fence from my next-door neighbor’s garden. It is native to Eurasia and considered an invasive in some parts of North America where early settlers brought it to grow in their gardens. Driving home from New Jersey last week, I saw it growing in drifts along the side of the highway in Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
Perhaps no other weed has as many common names: dame’s rocket, damask-violet, dame’s-violet, dames-wort, dame’s gilliflower, night-scented gilliflower, queen’s gilliflower, rogue’s gilliflower, summer lilac, sweet rocket, mother-of-the-evening, Good & Plenties, and winter gillyflower (Wiki). As for its Latin name, Hesperis comes from the Greek word hespera, meaning evening, referring to the plant’s nocturnal fragrance.
In my front garden, Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ pops up, along with the hybrid Allium ‘Globemaster’, amidst the emerging foliage of grasses and summer perennials. Dramatic purple exclamation points in a sea of green, they offer a charming interlude in this quiet, green period between the last spring bulbs and the sages and catmint of June.
And then there’s an unassuming little native perennial that most of my neighbours would consider a weed. Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum) grows in shady spots in my garden and, unlike the European weeds that like to colonize every square inch of freshly-dug soil, it picks its spots carefully. Its name comes from the white patterns that adorn the foliage of many, but not all, plants. When its tubular, white flowers bloom above the lobed leaves in late May, they are very popular with bumble bees and other native bees.
If my fairy crown for May 24th makes me look like a shady lady, blame it on the woodland plants now emerging under deciduous trees freshly leafed-out in my garden. Most prominent in my crown is lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis), which I have nicknamed “guerilla of the valley” for its invasive nature. Native Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum) with its pendant, green-tipped, white flowers is visible over my right eye. The fuzzy white flowers are fothergilla, from the shrubs in my front pollinator garden. The lavender-blue flowers are Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’, and since the fragrant snowball viburnum (V. x carlcephalum) was still perfuming the air, I added one of those, too.
Most prominent of my woodlanders is native Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum). I love this plant – for its tall, elegant stems that always arch in the same direction, its pendant, pearl-drop flowers, its brilliant, gold autumn color and its absolute ease of care.
Each year, my drifts get a little bigger but it is easy to pull out by the roots if it meanders too far down a border. It thrives in a partly shaded location in my side yard garden where, along with other woodlanders, it flanks the winding entrance path under my massive black walnut tree and is a joy from spring to fall.
Alas, the same cannot be said of my lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis). I suspect many gardeners have come to regret the day they bought a certain plant or ignored one already growing in their gardens. Since we’ve lived in our house for almost 40 years and there was not much here in the way of gardens when we bought it, I suspect it was hiding under overgrown shrubs along the property line. So when I began to dig out new beds and borders, enriching the soil with amendments and adding a big roster of desirable perennials, the lily-of-the-valley began its territorial march. So stealthy was this invasion and so quickly did it change the dynamic of my garden that I renamed it ‘guerilla-of-the-valley’. You can see it as a green carpet under the bulbs in this photo of my grandson tiptoeing through the tulips.
Not everyone has this problem; indeed many friends find it difficult to grow and would love a few pips; some garden writers even call it a “useful groundcover”. To that, I point to their dense, mat-like roots so tough to dig out and mutter Caveat emptor.
Nevertheless, the fragrance from my front garden in mid-May is enchanting and I always enjoy cutting the stems for little bouquets, either on their own or combined with other flowers in bloom now, including the fragrant viburnums, blue camassia, common grape hyacinth and small daffodils, including amazing, long-lasting ‘Golden Echo’, below.
In my front yard pollinator garden, the fothergilla shrubs (F. ‘Mount Airy’) come into flower now with their scented, cream-white, bottlebrush inflorescences. Depending on the amount of summer sunshine and rain or irrigation my garden receives (and fothergilla does prefer adequately moist soil), the leathery leaves take on vivid fall colours of yellow, gold, apricot, scarlet and purple.
I love white and blue combinations in the garden and this fothergilla-camassia duo is delightful.
Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’ is such a lovely spring bulb, a cultivar of Pacific Northwest native Leichtlin’s camas or ‘quamash’ that is surprisingly hardy in the east. My camassia clumps expand each year, as they do in the camas prairies of British Columbia, Washington and Idaho where their edible roots which were a food staple for native peoples. The gorgeous blue flowers offer nectar to queen bumble bees, below, and honey bees provisioning their nests; they also make beautiful cut flowers.
Camassia has a place in my lily pond garden in the back yard as well.
Like tulips and daffodils, camassia foliage should be allowed to turn yellow to feed the underground bulb. If camassia has a fault, it’s that the blooms last such a short time, but for me, a brief, utterly memorable scene is better than one that lasts so long that you stop noticing it. Here’s a little musical video tribute.
Along with the camassia, the weeks-long parade of tulips culminates now with the Single Late tulips featuring elegant flowers on tall stems.
Among my many favorites are purple-black ‘Queen of Night’….
….rose-pink ‘Menton’…..
….and orange-scarlet ‘El Nino’…..
… with its cyclone swirls of salmon, orange, yellow and pink.
In my garden, the month of May brings the familiar song of the cardinal high up in my black walnut tree, the flurry of house sparrows making nests in the cedar hedge and the buzz of queen bumble bees emerging from their winter nests to forage for pollen. Most of the early bulbs have now faded away and it is prima donna season for shimmering white daffodils and tulips in a rainbow of warm hues. My fairy crown for early May is a celebration of mid-spring abundance featuring tulips in peach, pink and lilac; ‘Geranium’, ‘Stainless’ and ‘Thalia’ daffodils; peachy ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinth still in flower; blue-and-white grape hyacinths (Muscari aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’); wine-red snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris); a truss of magenta ‘PJM’ rhododendron; the delicate red blossoms of my Japanese maple (Acer palmatum); and the first tiny, blue flowers of perennial Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla).
Now is also the time when I rummage through my cupboards searching out small vases, shot glasses, votive candle holders and favorite mugs to hold these long-awaited blossoms to bring the joy and fragrance of spring indoors.
My front garden flanks the city sidewalk – no fence, no obstacles for neighbours and passersby who wish to stop and gaze or capture the flowers with their cell phone. And it’s never more popular than now, when the bulbs bloom in riotous profusion in what will be a towering prairie months later – no single-color blocks for me!
I’ve never understood gardeners who turn down their noses at tulips. Yes, they’re gaudy! Isn’t that the point? We need color after a long winter.
The ‘Shogun’ tulips continue to open while the big Fosteriana tulip ‘Orange Emperor’ starts to flower as well. I mentioned how much I love orange, right?
Each autumn, I add to the assortment, but old favourites include the big Darwin Hybrids ‘Pink Impression’….
… and ‘Apricot Impression’…
…. and the elegant lily-flowered tulip ‘Ballerina’.
Other tulips in my spring repertoire that have hung around for more than a few seasons are the luscious double ‘Lilac Perfection’….
…. and the double fringed tulip ‘Crispion Sweet’.
Fragrance in daffodils is important to me, as are longevity and a tendency to multiply. I love the spicy scent of the old Tazetta cultivar ‘Geranium’, with its clustered, shimmering-white flowers with orange cups, like a hardy paperwhite.
And the Triandus hybrid daffodil ‘Thalia’ – sometimes called the orchid narcissus – is another winner. Its dainty, white flowers with their reflexed petals are lovely in spring nosegays, especially with blue grape hyacinths.
Here is ‘Thalia’ in the garden; you can see how it multiplies. And you can also see my favourite little Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’ still in bloom behind.
I do have a fondness for white daffodils (as well as ‘Golden Echo’), and I love those with salmon-pink trumpets, like ‘Pink Charm’, below.
Finally, there’s the Large Cup daffodil ‘Stainless’ with pure white flowers, on the left below.
The hyacinths from my last fairy crown fade in colour but stay in flower for a long period. Because I love plant combinations of blue and orange, I mix the bulbs of peach-orange ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinth and blue-and-white grape hyacinth Muscari aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’ together with delightful results!
That little grape hyacinth is a stunner in tiny bouquets, too. Here it is with Narcissus ‘Thalia’, Muscari latifolium and Anemone blanda ‘Blue Shades’.
Snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagaris) is an elegant dark horse in the mid-spring garden with its pendulous, checkered, wine-red flowers. The specific ephithet meleagris means “spotted like a guinea fowl” so another common name is the guinea hen flower.
Though it’s not featured in my crown, another bulb blooming in my garden at this time is summer snowflake, Leucojum aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’ (which, despite its name, is a spring-bloomer). I don’t have nearly enough of these elegant flowers.
We often think of Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) primarily as specimen trees, but stand near one in flower on a sunny day in spring….
…. and try to count the native bees buzzing around the tiny, pendulous, red blossoms, like this spring-active Andrena bee. That’s the little dangling red jewel over my right eye in the fairy crown.
My old tree is planted in a south-facing site in front of our living room windows where it is protected from the cold, north wind – and serves as my leafy curtain from May through November. Here it is outside my 2nd-floor window (and that’s my husband strolling out in a spring shower.)
Heading into my back garden, we find the tiny blue flowers of Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla), a frothy groundcover perennial under spring bulbs. It thrives in part shade and is low-maintenance, ultra-hardy, long-flowering and unbothered by pests or disease. There are many variegated-leaf cultivars, but I am partial to the regular species with its lush green leaves. Here it is growing with rhubarb and European wild ginger (Asarum europaeum).
My back garden has a thriving population of ostrich ferns, which is a nice way of saying they’re very successful invaders. Growing amidst them are lots of mid-season tulips whose names I’ve long forgotten, but I believe the magenta-pink one is ‘Don Quichotte’. Aren’t they pretty?
Not all plants in a garden last indefinitely. Some barely hang on, others fight disease, some struggle with winter temperatures – and that’s the case with my Mezitt-hybrid Rhododendron ‘PJM’. At one time, I had three of these hardy, small-flowered shrubs near my lily pond, but over the years they declined, leaving just one to greet spring with its clusters of outrageously brilliant magenta flowers – and a place of honor in my fairy crown.
Speaking of my crown, I’ll leave with a little bouquet of my deconstructed Fairy Crown #4. What could be prettier than these lovely May flowers?
A fairy crown. A flowery tiara. A chaplet. A corona for Corona-virus times! When I got the brilliant idea to mark another gardening season with a series of “What’s in Bloom” floral wreaths for my head, below….
…I was not inventing something new. People have actually been crowning themselves with flowers and greenery for millennia. Take Dionysus, for example, the Greek god of all things wine and too-much-fun (the Romans called him Bacchus). This is how Caravaggio imagined him, circa 1598, with a Bacchanalian wreath of grape leaves.
During a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few years ago, it was a painting by the Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema that made me peer a little closer. In ‘Spring’, from 1892, the artist had created a procession of celebrants wearing floral crowns wending their way through the streets of Rome. The Getty’s website says: “It is unclear exactly which festival Alma-Tadema meant to depict, but the many references from ancient Rome all indicate a springtime celebration of fertility and abundance, perhaps most resembling Floralia, honoring Flora, goddess of flowers. British May Day traditions were also rooted in the Floralia festival and were revived during the 1800s to celebrate spring and nature in the face of rapid industrialization. On May 1, children decked themselves and their village with flowers, danced, and crowned a May Queen.”
When I was a little girl, I attended a Catholic convent in Victoria, B.C. called St. Ann’s Academy. It was on a beautiful property filled with gardens and orchards that the nuns tended… religiously. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). In my 3rd grade class photo from 1956 (!) below, you can see the massive rhododendrons behind us. Today, St. Ann’s is a Provincial Heritage Site and ‘events venue’ with a small museum. But my point here is that every May 1st, or May Day, we girls would have a procession through the grounds carrying flowers to a statue of Mary while singing “Mary we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May”. Thinking back now (as an atheist), it still seems like the most beautiful idea, the floral crowning part at any rate. Who wouldn’t want to be “queen of the May”?
It was her own Catholic iconography that Mexican painter Frida Kahlo invoked when she painted her 1940 Self-PortraitDedicated to Dr. Eloesser. From the Frida Kahlo website: “Frida’s necklace of thorns is just a single strand, but it draws even more blood. In the background, leafless broken-off twigs profiled against an opalescent sky look like the dead twigs woven into Frida’s necklace in the self-portrait with the hummingbird. No doubt the dry white buds that mingle with the twigs (and that droop from Frida’s headdress as well) likewise refer to her desolation. Although Frida has flowers in her hair and wears the earrings in the shape of hands that Picasso gave her when she was in Paris, she looks like someone dressed for a ball for which she has no escort. Frida’s work from the year in which she and Diego Rivera were separated demonstrates a heightened awareness of color’s capacity to drive home emotional truths.”
My photo project, on the other hand, was dedicated whimsically to the Goddess Flora…..
…. as featured in Botticelli’s famous Primavera, circa 1482, with its 500 identifiable plant species. How many can you identify?
*****
After seeing one of my spring crowns, my son said I was ready to go to Coachella. I had to look up why that would be. Ah…. a music festival in California! Of course, they wear flower crowns there and it’s all groovy, except, most are fake flowers! That would never do. And I did note that some famous floral designers had designed massively ornate headdresses for garden muses to celebrate 2019 Garden Day in the UK. They were lovely, but not really what I had in mind. I just wanted to celebrate the flowering cycle for my garden by…. putting it on my head! It seemed like my inner child was whispering to me, as if Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell had made a perfectly reasonable suggestion about head-wear. So I decided to call it a ‘fairy crown’, and my first edition for April 7th features the earliest spring-bloomers in my Toronto garden, common snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), purple and orange crocuses, bright-yellow winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) and the sweet, hard-working little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’. (Some friends suggested I do the series as “how-to make fairy crowns”, which made me laugh. My crowns last as long as it takes to make a selfie, then proceed to fall apart everywhere.)
After five long months of winter, the return of spring to my Toronto garden is a glorious time. Endorphins rise in me like sap in a maple tree. And while it’s not quite time to retire the snow shovel and winter coat, everything that’s magical about gardening lies in the weeks and months ahead. Each spring I make little bouquets of my first tiny bulbs to create that joyous feeling indoors, too. It’s often still chilly in the garden and cutting a few flowers for the kitchen table lets me explore them up close with my camera – and my nose! And it always starts with sweet-scented snowdrops. I made this image for a project a long time ago, using a crystal shot glass from an antique “gentleman’s travelling bar” that my father-in-law gave to my husband. The caption is dramatic, but not far off reality. By late March, the gardener is parched for beauty; spring lets us drink it in.
But spring teases in our part of the world, thus the common name for snowdrops.
For the past decade, I’ve kept track of the date of the first snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) to bloom in my garden with the earliest appearance being March 7, 2012 and the latest April 16, 2014. That’s a difference of almost 6 weeks, illustrating the vagaries of winter in the northeast. No matter when they bloom, there’s still a chance that a late snowfall will cause them to close their petals and serve as an appropriate reminder as to how they earned their common name. Snowdrops are easy to grow from a small bulb that should be planted in autumn as soon as they become available, since they deteriorate quickly. But I’ve moved flowering clumps around in spring with great success, something that can’t be easily done with other bulbs. They prefer humus-rich soil in part shade, but like to dry out in summer.
But when they flower with all their sweet-scented goodness after the dearth of winter, there is nothing like a pristine clump of snowdrops, which is why the gardening world has so many “galanthophiles” who grow, rave about and trade various species and cultivars of snowdrops.
Though I appreciate that kind of obsession, for me the common snowdrop is perfection, though you must either get down on your knees or pluck a few for a nosegay to truly appreciate the shimmering, white flowers with their green-edged inner tepals. The bonus? They emit a delicate perfume – much easier to savor in a bouquet than in the garden.
Within a few days of the snowdrops opening, the silken, purple “Tommy” crocuses (Crocus tomassinianus) appear. Here they’re joined by an early showing of the Dutch hybrid crocus ‘Pickwick’ whose fellow hybrids usually appear a week or so later.
A few days of spring warmth and sunshine encourage all the crocuses into bloom together. When that happens, my front garden looks like the Easter bunny arrived to sprinkle crocuses, instead of hiding eggs – and it becomes a favourite spot for passersby to click photos. Because my front garden is never ‘tidied’ much in autumn, it’s a trick to get out and cut back the old stems of the prairie perennials from last year while the soil is still frozen so the little bulbs can shine. But they always come up through scattered leaf mulch and stubble – all good food for the earthworms and soil organisms.
Here are four of the Dutch hybrid crocuses, their names lost in the mists of time. When I originally planted the crocus bulbs en masse in the 1990s, many were dug up immediately by squirrels. In fact, a few days later, the garden looked like the craters of the moon. Now I immediately mulch bulb plantings with leaves (even getting some from my neighbours’ boulevards) and water them down so the squirrels don’t have a ‘nose’ for the freshly cultivated soil.
When it’s warm enough to fly (15C-59F), honey bees seek out the pollen-rich crocus flowers. They’re especially fond of Crocus x luteus ‘Golden Yellow’.
Look at this happy vignette, with crocuses joined by Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.
Of all the spring irises I’ve tried and lost, this little iris is a true survivor, shrugging off harsh winters and late snowfalls to show off her indigo-striped, pale-blue flowers alongside her crocus companions. Hardy, easy and beautiful, she makes good-sized clumps over the years and is an attractive cut flower in a tiny vase. A small caveat: she does tend to get a virus that causes blue splotches on her petals and is transmissible to other members of the iris family. But since I have none growing near her, I don’t bother about it.
Gardeners in the northeast are accustomed to spring sputtering forward slowly and occasionally backtracking to winter (like this year). It’s been known to happen in my garden, and I shared the rhyme below on my Facebook page on April 3, 2016.
There once was an iris named Kate
Who sulked when winter stayed late:
“I’m tired of the cold and this foul April snow.
Had I known, I’d have remained well below!”
It happens to crocuses, too, but they have adapted to cold, snowy weather by keeping their flowers closed and their pollen protected.
Winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis), those lemon-yellow flowers in my fairy crown, have evolved a similar adaption to protect their pollen from inclement weather, as you see below.
The odd snowflake aside, spring has now sprung in my garden and the robins are seeking out earthworms once again.
And if you don’t feel inclined to make your own fairy crown, you can always cut a few stems of these tiny treasures to bring indoors and appreciate at nose level. Spring is here at last!
