Saturday, April 26, 2008

April 27 2008


April is full of surprises out here as we continue to careen from season to season. On the 4th we had snow flurries, a week later it was 80 (yes, really, 80!), and right now the weather is near perfect. Sunny but not too hot, the daffodils in this shot have already died back, but later blooms including the double ruffles are still around. The cascading rhododendrons still have some blooms, and the big bright pink rhods are not yet open. Lilacs are setting buds, creeping phlox showing some color, and the forsythia are a shrieking yellow that goes so well with the daffs. I'm trying to root some of the stems I forced indoors a few weeks ago, we have plans to put them on the lower hillside if they do indeed root. Seems likely as they've got lots of leaves on the stems, but only time will tell.

My beloved wood violets are coming up in places both expected and unexpected. The garlic bed has an entire ground cover of blooming white violets that I have no recollection of planting, and they are scattering themselves among the lower terraces in wild abandon. We've not yet bought our vegetables or the usual violas and pansies for color spots, as we'll be gone for a week, and will do that when we return. But as with the violets, the violas happily seeded themselves in the most amazing places - they seem to really like the crannies in the rock walls, where I carefully pry them out and set them as front terrace borders. So even without a trip to the nursery, I have some happy flower faces to see. And the tulips - how amazing! A bunch of bright red flowers come up each year a few inches from the dryer vent; that certainly worked out well. And as I now know where they are, and check for them, I can spray them with the Deer Minders spray (not to be confused with Deer Off or Deer Deterrent or any of the other things I got that never worked) and the deer do not eat them!

Columbine both wild and cultivated are sprouting, hostas poking through the ground, irises already a foot and a half high and loving the unseasonable warm spells. Since it's still so early I'm poking through what's left of the leaf litter from last fall and every once in a while find something I completely forgot. We're now in our fifth gardening season and I can see the reason for a minimum five-year plan for a garden bigger than a city lot. Brian is always very busy at this time of year resetting the stone walls that winter snows and later rains move around, and we've had to replant some things that just didn't like our first location choice for them.

But all in all it's extremely satisfying to stroll around (after hours of weeding) and see the results of our years of work. The place really looks like gardeners live here! And just to remind us who this really belongs to, our group of four deer tromp through often enough to make their point that they were here first. And a few days ago Mr. and Mrs. Mallard showed up again for a brief pond feeding. As much as I don't "heart" New York, even I can see how someone would fall in love with this area - if one saw it first in the spring!