My third fairy crown for April 25th brings this little wearable garden project one year full circle, from last April 14th when I made my first floral crown. Let’s look at this year’s model, featuring peach-orange ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinths; assorted early daffodils including my favourite, the small bicolored ‘Golden Echo’; the fabulous apricot-orange Tulipa praestans ‘Shogun’; T. kaufmanniana ‘Johann Strauss’; early broad-leaved grape hyacinth (Muscari latifolium); Greek windflower (Anemone blanda ‘Blue Shades’); dusky-mauve fumewort (Corydalis solida); and forsythia (F. x intermedia).
Last year, I crafted my very first floral crown with many of these spring blossoms, but spring weather being what it is, they were in flower 11 days earlier. And given that I’d only planted the ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinths in fall 2020, they took their time flowering and weren’t in the mix that early in 2021.
Soon after the “little blue bulbs” from my last fairy crown hit their stride, a few of the smaller daffodils and species tulips emerge, launching a long flowering ‘big bulb’ parade in a rainbow of colors and shapes. I know it doesn’t look like much now, but this little pollinator island…
….. is filled with fothergilla, sage, catmint, echinacea, rudbeckia, perovskia, liatris and sedums later; it works hard for its keep!
You can see Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ bulking up here.
Given how some of the fancy tulip hybrids disappear within a few years, my most important criterion for tulips is that they must be reliably perennial. Because I’m fond of orange in the spring garden (especially with bright pink), my favourite early tulip is the multi-stemmed, pumpkin-orange Tulipa praestans ‘Shogun’ (10-12”). Here it is with hyacinths and Greek anemones, as well as blue Siberian squill.
Like many species tulips, ‘Shogun’ multiplies nicely year after year.
I love the dark stamens. At night, the flowers close.
This is also the season for the dependable Kaufmanniana tulips with their striped leaves, like ‘Johann Strauss’, below.
My early daffodil favorite is the little Jonquilla daffodil called ‘Golden Echo’, bred by my Virginia friends Brent and Becky Heath, which I have blogged about previously. Its multiple 12-16” stems mean that its creamy-white flowers with bright golden trumpets keep flowering for several weeks. Here it is below with broad-leaved grape hyacinth (Muscari latifolium)….
….. with its unusual bi-colored flower spikes. It’s the first of the grape hyacinths to bloom in my garden.
I like to plant hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) every few years, choosing a spot close to the walkway so their perfume can be enjoyed. As the years pass, their stiff flower spikes begin to relax; though they do not multiply, I still want them in the garden. This is 6-year old ‘Pink Pearl’ with pale-blue striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides), still going strong in our cool spring.
I was quite pleased with this vignette, showing Hyacinthus ‘Gipsy Queen’ in a carpet of blue Siberian squill with Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’ and pink ‘Beth Evans’ corydalis (C. solida) behind.
My Grecian windflowers (Anemone blanda) are flowering now, too; this is ‘Blue Shades’. These sweet ephemerals hail from subalpine meadows and woodlands in the Balkans but they’re perfectly hardy in my garden and such a delight when the long-lasting, daisy-like flowers open amidst the ferny, low foliage. When you’re planting this species in autumn, be sure to soak the knobby tubers overnight and plant them with the smooth side facing down. Unlike daffodils and tulips which don’t mind drying out in summer, windflowers prefer soil that remains reasonably moist.
On the path into my back garden, the common purple corydalis (C. solida) carpets the earth where tall Solomon’s seals emerge to flower in June. The corydalis has now spread throughout my garden and the “lawn”, but disappears completely within a few weeks.
Some years, I’ve added purple pansies to the corydalis carpet for a little excitement!
In this partly-shaded area under my black walnut tree, the winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) have stayed in bloom a long time, and look quite enchanting with the ‘Beth Evans’ corydalis that popped up in their midst.
Every spring is a little different, and this one is decidedly reluctant. But I have always hated the tendency for Ontario springs to go from snow to tropical heat overnight – and that can’t be said about 2022. In fact, we could well have a repeat of 2021’s late snow, below (possibly even this week).
So it’s always a good idea to cut a few blossoms to savour in the house….
….. because having these little treasures at hand is our reward for surviving another Ontario winter!
My second fairy crown for April features an assortment of early spring blossoms that follow fast on the heels of the snowdrops, irises, winter aconites and crocuses that I featured in my first blog in this series. For this one, I gathered flowers of the hardy bulbs: blue Siberian squill (Scilla siberica), white-centered glory-of-the-snow (Scilla forbesii, formerly Chionodoxa), pale-blue striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides), pink ‘Beth Evans’ corydalis (C. solida) and a few sprigs of scented Farrer’s viburnum (V. farrreri).
In my neighbourhood, early spring features a phenomenon I call ‘blue lawns’. That’s what happens when the little bulb Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) with its nodding, azure flowers…..
….becomes naturalized, as in my garden, below, along with white-centered glory-of-the-snow (Scilla forbesii, formerly Chionodoxa). Although some regions have found these little bulbs to be invasive, their ephemeral nature means that after finishing flowering they disappear completely. In my garden, summer perennials later completely cover the areas where the squill shone blue a few months earlier.
Although not quite as aggressive as Siberian squill, glory-of-the-snow seeds around slowly to create the same lustrous pools of blue,pale pink and white. Native to Turkey, its starry, white-centered blossoms have a sprightly presence and are particularly lovely under magnolia and forsythia.
Native to western Asia and the Caucasus, striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides) is another little treasure in my early spring garden. It takes a lot of shade, since some have thrived and multipled tucked in behind a large boxwood shrub.
The bright pink flowers of Corydalis solida ‘Beth Evans’ offer a striking contrast to glory-of-the-snow. I’ve written about the ‘fumeworts’ before; you can read my blog here.
Many years, it seems, winter is not quite finished in Toronto by the time the early bulbs have started to flower. But they routinely shrug off the odd flurry…
….. and even survive a more serious dump of snow. Brrrr…. snow is in the forecast this week as well!
Some springs, my little Greek windflowers (Anemone blanda) show their faces in time for a wintry blast. This year, I’m still waiting.
Long ago, when garden rooms were becoming popular, I designed a little fragrance garden for my back yard with a trompe l’oiel trellis backdrop and a small cherub reflected in a mirror. In truth, it was intended to disguise the wall of my next-door neighbour’s garage. One of the first plants I purchased was Farrer’s viburnum (V. farreri), now at its mature size of 12 feet height, 8’ width. It bears clusters of sweetly-perfumed pale-pink flowers in early spring; some even emerge during a February thaw, contrasting with the big forsythia in my neighbour’s garden.
But by late March to mid-April, it is always in full bloom, much to the delight of overwintering mourning cloak butterflies….
….. and the first bees seeking nectar on warm days.
All these early spring bulbs provide loads of material for tiny bouquets whose ingredients vary slightly from year to year, depending on the weather. In 2019, below, Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’ was still in flower, as were my crocuses. This year they’re finished.
In 2021, I combined corydalis and Siberian squill in a votive candle holder.
Five years ago, I made this photo of my granddaughter Emma clutching a little bouquet of Siberian squill she’d picked especially for our anniversary on April 16th. Now 8 years old, she asked for scissors yesterday to pick flowers for….
….. our Easter dinner table – the day after our 45th anniversary!
Emma and her two younger brothers have packed up their chocolate bunnies and headed home now with mommy and daddy. But on my kitchen table sit the flowery reminders of their stay – and another April fairy crown.
My long Covid Winter project has come to an end. Spring has sprung and I am ready to be outdoors! I began on November 1st with an entry every day, except for a few days off at Christmas. Altogether, I logged 144 #janetsdailypollinator posts over the months of November, December, January, February and now March. In going through my photo library, I have enough pollinator photos for 4 more months of daily posts, but it’s time to be in the garden. Here are my posts for March, and one GIANT family portrait at the end!
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March came in like a lion… or was it a lamb? I can’t really remember, because March is March: still winter, the odd warm caress of spring, snow flurries, driving rain and the faithful return of the cardinal’s song. On March 1st, I celebrated stiff-leaved goldenrod (Solidago rigida/Oligoneuron rigidum) with honey bees, below, and recalled the way it grew in my beekeeper friend Tom Morrisey’s tallgrass prairie at his farm in Orillia, Ontario. I wrote a blog about Tom & Tina’s wonderful property and his honey harvest there.
On March 2nd I remembered all the honey bees I found feverishly gathering pollen on a southern magnolia (M. grandiflora) while I was wandering around a beach park in New Zealand. And I looked at various other magnolia species and the latest research on their ancestral pollinators.
We love preparing dishes with the leaves of culinary herbs – and bees love herb flowers! March 3rd saw me recounting the many bees I’ve seen on basil, below, as well as oregano, thyme, rosemary and sage.
Many species clematis attract bees and on March 4th I featured several, including Clematis pitcheri (below), C. koreana, C. recta ‘Purpurea’, C. jouiniana ‘Praecox’, C. virginiana and C. heracleifolia.
A favourite native wildflower – and one I grow in part shade at the cottage in Muskoka – was featured on March 5th. Golden alexanders (Zizia aurea) attracts solitary bees, especially Andrena mining bees like the one foraging below.
March 6th was my tribute to the popular European woodland or meadow sages (Salvia nemorosa) like ‘Amethyst’, below, that attract all kinds of bees during their early summer flowering.
“Seven-son flower” always reminds me of martial arts but it’s all about the Chinese translation of the seven flower clusters on the branches. Heptacodium miconioides from China was my March 7th pollinator plant because the bees adore it, especially since it flowers in late summer or early autumn when there isn’t a lot of nectar on offer.
The native subshrub lead plant (Amorpha canescens) starred on March 8th and I featured photos of plants in the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden. That’s a common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) foraging on the flowers, below.
March 9th saw me honouring ‘Jeana’ summer phlox (Phlox paniculata), a much-in-demand cultivar of an old-fashioned North American native that is absolutely irresistible to butterflies and bees. I photographed ‘Jeana’ with her insect admirers at New York Botanical Garden back on August 18, 2016. I also wrote a blog about NYBG you might enjoy reading!
I donned my rubber boots on March 10th and went into the Muskoka wetlands to check out bumble bees and dragonflies on pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata).
On March 11th, I featured hardy border sedums or stonecrops (Sedum spectabile/Hylotelphium telephium) like ‘Autumn Joy’ with pink flowers and succulent leaves. They are among the best late summer perennials for attracting butterflies and all kinds of bees.
Old-fashioned veronicas or speedwells were my pollinator choice for March 12th. Bees and wasps love them, whether the common thread-waisted wasp (Ammophila procera) on Veronica spicata ‘Darwin’s Blue’ in my cottage gardens, below, or bumble bees and honey bees on several other veronicas I featured that day.
On March 13th, I recalled my Victoria, BC childhood and the pungent fragrance of calendulas or pot marigolds (Calendula officinalis) in my mother’s garden. It was an etymology lesson that day, for “Calendar” derives from the Latin ‘calendae’, i.e. first day of the month and also gave its name to calendula, i.e. the “flower of the calends”. Because the plant flowers every month of the year in the Mediterranean ,where it is native, the ancient Romans named it for the tax assessed on the first day of each month – the calend.
I went for a ‘confusing nomenclature’ lesson on March 14th with Russian sage, Perovskia atriplicifolia. You see, it’s not really Russian but native to western China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey. And it’s no longer called Perovskia, but Salvia yangii. Revisions to familiar old names based on genetic sequencing tend to irritate gardeners (not taxonomists), but bees don’t care at all. For them, it’s just the same nectar-filled flowers with a different name.
“Beware the Ides of March”. Every high school English student remembers that warning from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’. For my March 15th post, I chose to go with “bee ware” for the Ides of March and picked bee-friendly, native red maple (Acer rubrum) with its abundant, early spring pollen and nectar for bees like the unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis), below. This date also initiated my final 16 days of the series, each of which will focus on a pollinator relationship for spring.
March 16th celebrated winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis), the earliest spring bulb and a great source of pollen for bees. I also explained how this plant exhibits a temperature-mediated plant movement called thermonasty, the yellow flowers closing in cold, cloudy weather and opening wide in warm sunshine.
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Willows (Salix spp.) were my focus on March 17th, being that they’re such important early-flowering sources of pollen for bees provisioning their nests, like the unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis) on pussy willow below.
On March 18th Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) from Europe was my spring star, its clusters of tiny, yellow flowers a welcome sight for bees and hover flies. I also offered a little lesson in ancient botanical nomenclature, from Theophrastus to Gerard.
The first crocuses emerged just in time for my March 19th post honouring them as abundant early pollen sources for honey bees. I also gave a little visual lesson on the #1 threat to honey bee colonies: varroa mites.
On the first day of spring, March 20th, I honoured a sweet-scented, very early-blooming shrub that’s been in my garden for decades, Farrer’s viburnum (V. farreri), named for explorer Reginald Farrer. There are always butterflies and bees searching out nectar on the pale-pink blossoms. I wrote a blog on this plant, too.
On March 21st I posted about the little blue-flowered bulbs called Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) that appear briefly in my front garden in the 2-month parade of spring bulbs. Their bright-blue pollen and nectar is collected by bees (including native spring bees Colletes and Andrena) and butterflies. Curiosity about the interaction between native spring bees and this non-native bulb prompted me to write a 2017 blog called The Siberian Squill and the Cellophane Bee.
Bee-friendly early spring Lungworts (Pulmonaria spp.) starred on March 22nd, along with an etymology on their common and Latin names, rooted way back in the day when the white spots on the leaves of the herbalist’s P. officinalis suggested lung disease. Fortunately, medicine has become a little more evidence-based today.
“I was born in Amelanchier alnifolia”. That was my opening line for my March 23rd post, and of course it referenced my birth in the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, or what the Cree called Kaminasaskwatominaskwak, “the place where many saskatoon berry bushes grow”. I also explored why so many serviceberries seem to bear abundant summer fruit – without ever having had pollinators visit. That’s because (unlike the one below, A. humilis, at our cottage on Lake Muskoka) some Amelanchier species are ‘apomicts’, producing fruit asexually. If you want to read more about my visit to Wanuskewin Heritage Park outside Saskatoon, ‘where many saskatoon berry bushes grow’, this is my blog from 2018.
Bees love grape hyacinths (Muscari spp.) and so do I. On March 24th I featured the fragrant blue-flowered bulbs and all the butterflies, bees and flies that forage in the bell-shaped flowers.
On March 25th I paid tribute to crabapples (Malus), especially my little weeping ‘Red Jade’ that grows beside my lily pond. It has its problems, but on those odd-numbered years when it flowers (2017, 2019, 2021!) – being an alternate-bearer like some of its biennial-bearing wild crabapple ancestors of eastern Europe – bees and butterflies enjoy foraging on its white blossoms. Later, birds and squirrels and even raccoons enjoy the tiny red fruits.
Despite having previously posted four different alliums (onion family) for pollinators in my series, on March 26th I featured several more possibilities, beginning with Allium giganteum hosting a carpenter bee, below, but also A. cristophii, A. ‘Purple Sensation’, A. obliquum, A. nigrum, A. ‘Millenium’ and, from the veggie garden, chives, A.schoenoprasum and regular onions, A. cepa.
Blackberries! My March 27th post was a bit confessional. The fact is, I fight with my native Allegheny blackberries (Rubus allegheniensis) at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, below with a native Andrena bee, and secretly loved the jam I made as a kid in British Columbia from the highly invasive Himalayan blackberries (R. armeniacum).
Because I loved watching a rain-soaked bumble bee nectaring in the pendulous blossoms of redvein enkianthus (E. campanulatus) in the David Lam Asian garden at Vancouver’s UBC Botanical Garden, my post on March 28th paid tribute to that beautiful Asian shrub.
On March 29th, I featured a beautiful, big Asian shrub that my next-door neighbour grows – appropriately called beautybush (Kolkwitzia amabilis, recently renamed Linnaea). I always think of it as my “borrowed scenery”, to quote a Japanese design concept known as ‘shakkei’. June bees and swallowtail butterflies love the scented flowers.
Most of my garden ‘weeds’ seem to get on very well without the help of pollinators, at least none that I notice. But Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginanum) is a little native perennial that I did not plant – i.e. a ‘weed’ in some people’s estimation – but bumble bees are so happy that it has found little niches here and there in damp, partly shaded soil. It was my pollinator plant for March 30th.
The final pollinator post of my Covid winter series for March 31st was a bulb I grow and love in my spring garden, as do the bees. Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’ is a commercial cultivar of great camas, an edible bulb native to the Pacific northwest that is nevertheless hardy in most of the northeast. In Victoria, B.C. where I grew up, the parent species is part of the Garry Oak ecosystem, along with the smaller Camassia quamash. I wrote a blog about that back in 2014. In my front garden, the tall lavender blue flower spikes look gorgeous with late tulips; in my back garden, it pairs with alliums. If it has a fault, it’s that the flowers are rather fleeting – being so beautiful, you wish they’d last much longer.
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So that’s it. One-hundred-and-forty-four posts later, I can satisfy my love of geometry and photo montages with a BIG display of all my Covid winter pollinators. I hope you enjoyed the ones you read about, and don’t forget, if you ever want to see them again – on Facebook, Instagram or anywhere on the internet – you just have to click on the magical hashtag #janetsdailypollinator, and up they’ll come, buzzing, fluttering, rolling in pollen and probing deep into flowers for sweet nectar.
Before heading to California in late March, we contacted a Los Angeles friend to arrange to have dinner together on our only night in LA, before driving north to Santa Barbara.
“By the way,” she said. “A neighbour is having a garden party Sunday afternoon. Would you like to be our guests? She grows beautiful tulips.”
So it was that I wandered off the plane, into the washroom at LAX where I changed into garden party-ish attire, into the rental car, and just 6 hours after leaving wintery, ice-shrouded Toronto, onto a flower-filled patio a few blocks from Wilshire Boulevard. The bartender (a handsome, ponytailed dancer who’d done some hip-hop in Toronto), poured me a glass of white wine and I wandered out onto the patio, where I was relieved to note that the beautiful California people all wore sensible walking shoes and looked like us.
The flowers were lovely – spring bulbs and early perennials filling myriad terracotta pots on the patio, and purple and mauve cineraria in the raised beds that surrounded it.
The hostess apologized, mentioning the 90-degree heat wave the previous week that caused the tulips to open too quickly. I didn’t mind – it felt lovely just being outdoors in the sunshine after four months of the hardest winter in decades. And I could smell the sweet perfume of the daffodils sitting on a side table.
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Our hostess was an enthusiastic, long-time gardener, and this event was an annual fundraiser that raised money for a family cause near and dear to her heart. On the dining room table around a tureen filled with flowers, she had arranged several delicious, homemade cakes. I had three kinds. It was lunchtime in California, after all.
I wandered amongst the chatting guests in the house and past a vignette in the hallway that recalled a visit I’d made to California in November 2008. It was the very night that Obama became president, and I fell asleep in my San Francisco hotel room to the sound of young people walking below my window chanting “O-BA-MA, O-BA-MA!” It seemed like such a long time ago.
Back out on the patio I found my first honey bees of the year nectaring in the purple Canterbury bells. What a thrill it was to watch them buzzing contentedly – I hadn’t seen honey bees since October when they visited my autumn monkshoods.
As I was following the bees from flower to flower snapping photos, a man came up beside me and we began chatting. I learned that he was the hostess’s garden designer, Jon Shepodd, Seattle-based, but with a Los Angeles client list. In the small world department we compared notes and found we knew some of the same garden industry people.
Soon it was time to leave; I’d been awake since before dawn and the hotel beckoned for an afternoon nap. But the best part? I’d spent my first afternoon in California in an actual garden, tended lovingly by an actual gardener. It was going to be a great garden-touring trip, I could feel it.
