Flowers

Thanksgiving Point Tulip Festival 2014

I took my three younger kids to the Thanksgiving Point Tulip Festival yesterday. What a beautiful treat on a beautiful day! I’ve attended once before, when I was a volunteer, working on my Master Gardener certification. If you haven’t been, you should give a try next year. But you might want to try a day […]

It’s greenhouse time! And my winter-sowing experiment is working

It’s that wonderful time of the year again; the snow has melted (finally!), the perennial flowers are just starting to poke up through soil, and I’m feeling the urgency to get things started in the greenhouse. I decided to try winter sowing again to get some seeds sprouted, and then I’ll transfer seedlings into the […]

A Valentine’s Rose Garden

There are many joys of being married the second time, and one of the biggest for me is having a partner who is a closer fit with some of the things that matter so much in my life. Obviously, a big thing in my life is gardening. Especially flower gardening. Santia and I knew each […]

Planting the seeds of a happy life

If you’ve followed this blog in the past year, you know that my gardening life (and my blog activity) has slowed considerably since all the changes in my life took me away from that piece of ground I cultivated and loved for eight years.  Well, on October 10th, 2010 (10.10.10!) my sweet Santia and I […]

Nectarines are ready!!!

Hey, hey, my friends! My nectarines are ripe now! Been sampling some over the past several days, and it now looks like harvest time has come! Come and get ’em! We don’t can them, so we really do like to share with friends. We’ll eat a big bowl full, make a cobbler or something, and […]

A sad day for our elm tree

Early Saturday morning, before dawn, our Lacebark Elm (Ulmus parvifolia) suffered a major break from some heavy wind. We’ve had wind like this many times, but there was a weak crotch where two major scaffold branches were growing in too deep of a V-shape. When branches grow with narrow crotch angles, they end up with […]

The herbaceous hibiscus just opened its first blooms

This is one of my Hibscus moscheutos plants in large pots on my deck. The first two blooms opened up today. I love the purity of the white contrasted with the deep, rich red in the center and blended with the soft lemon color of the stamen. Such beauty!

It’s Hibiscus time! And other photos from this evening

  All the Hibiscus shrubs have burst into bloom this week. I love the one above — I think it’s Hibiscus syriacus ‘Aphrodite.’ I also have some double-flowered ones — they’re quite frilly and don’t really look like Hibscuses at all. Oh, and one more of the Aphrodite shrub, too: And I finally got my […]