May 15, 2013

Favorite Spring Plant Color Combos

Below: Purple Allium, Red "Bloodgood" Japanese Maple and variegated Dogwood.


Below: Blooming native Thimbleberry with Euphorbia and Golden Spiraea


Below: Kniphofia "Red Hot Poker", orange Helianthemum and Golden Privet


Below: Aaaaah... Kwaanzan Cherry blossoms, ruddy tips of new growth, and baby-blue skies.


Apr 15, 2013

Native Red-Flowering Currants

If you live in the Pacific Northwest and don't have these growing somewhere on your place, make sure you add some of these beautiful and carefree plants to your garden. They are hardy as can be and in Spring, right now, they are attractive to the first returning hummingbirds of the season. What a treat!

These plants are about 6 feet tall now, at four years of age.
Later in the fall, these bushes will be boiling with beautiful hungry Robins and Waxwing birds who eat the small berries. Two seasons of effortless natural birdfeeding! I have tried the berries, they are not that exciting so they are strictly for the birds! The Red-flowering Currant plants shown in these pictures are about 4 years old. I purchased them for just $1 each at my local Resource Conservation District sale. They were purchased as small bare-root canes. I planted them in the cold of February and mulched them well. I never watered them, not once. And look at them now! I did a bit of pruning this last winter to promote a vase-like shape to let sun (and birds) into the center of the shrub. That's all the care they have received, easy-peasy.


Mar 31, 2013

Spring's tender mercies

Rhubarb starts as a red head
amid decompressing leaves

And then looks like a green brain!

Unfurling Rhubarb leaf

Lovage Plant emerging...
This one is about 3 inches tall.


Spring's simple pleasures.

Casablanca Lillies getting started.
These are the big white fragrant ones.

Orange-blooming Oriental Lillies bustin' out.

Mar 10, 2013

Frosty Almost-Spring Morning

 There are plenty of exciting buds emerging on the Red-flowering Currants, with hot pink blossoms soon to follow. This morning though, the "pause" button is hit on all that progress, it's about 30 degrees out.


BELOW: Garden chores will have to wait...


BELOW: A chaotic bowl full of groundcover divisions that I'm raising for my Mom is kissed by the frost. The Creeping Jenny looks great! Also there are fruitless starwberries and Ajuga getting established.


BELOW: Some native Salal is gracefully edged by the frost, how pretty.


BELOW: Serviceberry buds, draped with frosty cobwebs.


Feb 26, 2013

Signs of Spring, at last!

New buds of wild evergreen Huckleberries look like tiny roses!

Witch Hazel (Hamamelis x intermedia "Diane") has many vanilla-scented scarlet "flowers"


Here is another post from years past about this wonderful shrub.