It’s been raining lightly most of the night and radar shows it continuing for a few more hours. This is welcome, the first rain in a few weeks, but a bit inconvenient as I’d planned three days of non-stop gardening to prepare for my first ever ‘open garden’ on Tuesday morning. A busload of keen garden lovers from Peterborough, a small city just over an hour northwest of here, will arrive and wander about, asking questions I hope to have answers to, and although I’m not overly anxious about it, I know they’ll be judging (silently, I hope) my capabilities as well as the garden itself. Any advice on this subject is welcome! This morning though, I can stop fretting thanks to the rain, and spend a bit of time to join Jim at Garden Ruminations, posting six things in my garden. Photos were taken yesterday.
I went outside early yesterday morning to discover my patch of oriental poppies have started to open – such a fabulous exclamation of crimson against an otherwise mainly green backdrop!
Lilacs have held on well this year, thanks to cooler than normal temperature. Quite often they’re almost done by the end of May but this year they should still be wafting their delicious fragrance about the garden for my Peterborough visitors on Tuesday. These are three of my favourites – an all white and a deep purple, both slow growing named varieties, first planted about 20 years ago way out back then transplanted closer to the house about eight years ago. Plus of course the very popular Lilac ‘Sensation.’ The bi-coloured petals look like a party in the garden, don’t they?
Spurred on my Amelia, The Shrub Queen, and her south Florida garden, I went out and bought a (very expensive!) miniature pineapple plant. SO exotic in my Canadian garden!! I kinda love it!
Less exotic (for me) but really, just as fabulous, are all the Alliums not in bloom. This is Allium karataviense. It has a very short stem but the flower ball can be quite large – this one is about the size of a softball! They also, like many alliums, can self seed very readily if happily situated. There’s several spots in my garden with dozens now blooming where once there was one. Probably time to start dead-heading instead of letting the seeds develop…
You’d think this is another Allium photo, what with all the A. ‘Purple Sensation’ in the front there, but really it’s just an example of how harsh this past winter was. Behind all the Allium stems, and more in focus, are leaves from a gorgeous yellow-flowering tree peony. It’s bloomed every year since I planted it, until this year, when at least half the branches/stalks/trunks died back, including all the dormant flower buds. There’s lots of new growth so I have hope for next year, and the root stock has sent up numerous herbaceous peony shoots with buds that will soon open (these will be cut back to the trunk after blooming), but I can’t help but picture how it would look – purple alliums in front of giant pale yellow peonies…
Finally, it’s once again lupin time! I seem to have fewer lupins starting to flower than most years (time to collect seed again!) but the plants I started from seeds collected from a pure pink one are flowering – and mostly in pink. There’s also various shades of purple and red and some bi-coloured ones and this deep purple one, almost shrub-sized…
Here’s a wider shot of the shrubby lupin, in situ. Have a great weekend everyone!
Poppies, Alliums, Lupins, Lilacs…so beautiful! For the Peterborough people, you could put up a ‘Welcome to our Yarden’ sign…they’d need to look that up…it explains your lovely property.
I especially enjoyed that last photo, showing a longer view of your property. The sightline to the lawn through the flowers in lovely. The sight of those purple aliums against the yellow ‘whatever’ suggests how pretty the purple against yellow peonies would be!