DryStoneGarden

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March Bloom Day — Hello Rain!

Welcome to a wet bloom day. I haven’t posted since last month. I don’t usually go bloom day to bloom day without a post, but it’s my busiest time of year. This week’s storms have given me a reprieve from work and have made our garden wet but happy. It’s still early for the garden to reach full bloom strength but a lot of plants have woken up. Most of the deciduous plants are in leaf or budding. The ninebark behind the Huechera was the first, coming into leaf around the beginning of the month and inow getting ready to open it’s first flowers. I thought that might be early, but it did this at the same time last year. I’ve tried to find things that might be early in our garden, but so far everything is close to its regular schedule.

The species tulip, Tulipa Saxatilis, is on the same schedule, but it has doubled in quantity since last year. They’ve taken a beating in this week’s storms, but they were probably the best thing in the garden last week.

The Doug Iris I photographed last month still has a bloom most days, but now we also have a couple of non-native irises blooming too.

The hellebore was blooming last month too. It’s in a container that sat next to the post our Clematis grows up, and last year a tendril of the clematis found its way into the pot and layered itself. We haven’t decided what we’re going to do with it: plant them both together somewhere, pull the clematis out and plant it, or discard the clematis. I like the clematis, but it’s just this kind of behavior — propagating itself in another plant’s container — that makes it hard to find a suitable home for it. In the meantime, the foliage looks pretty beside the hellebore.

Both of our hardenbergias are in full bloom.

Our Drimys winteri is blooming for the first time. I planted this a couple of years ago and more or less forgot about it. After taking the photo, I couldn’t remember what its name was. I saw these years ago in Chile, but had never seen the flowers before. Supposedly they’re mildly fragrant, but I couldn’t tell today with all the rain.

The poppies in our veggie garden these days seem to all be children of Mahogany Red. We used to have ‘White Linen’ and some pink ones from a mix. I’m pretty happy to have these red ones as the enduring variety. There are some other plants in the garden blooming, mostly looking wet and rather bedraggled from the storms. I’ll post a list later.

My thanks to garden blog impresario Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting bloom day. Click over for links to over a hundred other blogs posting about what’s blooming in their garden.

3 Responses to “March Bloom Day — Hello Rain!”

  1. March 15th, 2012 at 7:57 pm

    Town Mouse says:

    Well, those species tulips are certainly quite stunning. Maybe I’ll give those a try next fall. Congratulations on getting some rain – we did not get any on this side of the bay. Maybe Saturday…

  2. March 15th, 2012 at 8:06 pm

    Gayle Madwin says:

    That’s a great poppy color! I like the Hardenbergia, too.

    Everything in my garden is exactly on schedule this year except the golden currant, which is definitely early.

  3. March 15th, 2012 at 9:12 pm

    James says:

    This is the time of year I see hellebores starting up in people’s gardens in their blogs. I’d never really considered them a California thing but they look great up there. They WILL get a shot down here one of these planting seasons.

    And… “Wet but happy…”

    I’m a little jealous, but they’re promising us some real rain this weekend. Maybe some of the stragglers will get a chance to catch up. Enjoy the moisture!

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