A Fling with Spring Bling, Part 2

A friend requested "more, please!" after my last posting about life reasserting itself in the garden upon the arrival of spring (this one's for you, JB ;) and now that we're halfway through the season, life has certainly reasserted itself with a vengeance.

A bamboo grew four feet tall in one week and other plants are working hard to keep pace. The hummingbirds consume the contents of the nectar feeder faster than my daughter's weighty truck swallows gasoline. Chickadees snatch every bit of fluff shed by the dog. Buttercups threaten to engulf the house.

Here's a few pix. Planning to spend as much time this weekend in the garden as possible, as long as the sun's out!

Geranium 

Wild columbine, or at least the back of one. These beautiful little flowers
bashfully hold their heads down and don't look up til the last minute.

Leafhopper trekking down a columbine stem

The leaves of a heuchera get all the glory, but their flowers are pretty cool, too.

Bugleweed

Always love pansy faces! So cheerful.

Interior of geum

Dizzying fern

Forget-me-nots

Hard to capture maple flowers as it was breezy. They always
remind me of shooting stars.

Interior of rhododendron flower

Interior of rhododendron

Cottonwood-seed snowdrift

Getting to Know the Garden

Last year was a doozy of a year. Family illnesses and emergencies made it hard to find time to garden; falling off the front steps right at the juncture of spring and summer and breaking my arm effectively wiped out any gardening ambitions.

So although I certainly enjoyed seeing the magnolia bloom, the azaleas and rhododendrons burst in fireworks of blossoms, and the dogwoods deck themselves out in spangles of starlike flowers, I didn't really get to know the garden on that intimate, shovels-in-the-dirt, gravel-in-the-knees way that I'd gotten acquainted with my Seattle garden of 18 years.

It was blissful to be gifted with so many beautiful, warm, dry days this April and May--days that conveniently fell on weekends--to explore our new garden and get to know it better at, literally, a grassroots level. I especially liked discovering how beautiful the tracery of veins in fallen magnolia leaves are.

Things are popping up all over the place that we labor to identify (and to determine if it's OK to let them stay, lest we find ourselves with a horror on our hands like the Himalayan Balsam non-native highly invasive species that briefly lurked in our Seattle garden).

Earlier in the season, a plant came up near the drainage ditch out front that made me hold back the overeager scuffle hoe. There was something about the leaves that gave me pause, the way you might hesitate upon meeting someone who reminds you of somebody else.

I think I've managed to identify it as a native wildflower, the large-leafed geum. Cultivated geums are among my favorite flowers, so that explains why this plant tugged at my heartstrings and prevented me from tugging at its roots.

Apparently, the timing of this plant's growth of new leaves correlates with the birthing season of seals, so now every spring I can stand at the base of the driveway, check the drainage ditch, and say in tones of great profundity, "Somewhere, right now, a baby seal is being born."

Up the slope from this wildflower is a super-sized bleeding heart, which I saw briefly last year but really noticed this spring, especially as the plum tree that once stood next to it fell down in a windstorm this past autumn.

Bleeding hearts are always lovely, but this particular plant is bewitching me because it seems to be producing a clutch of white flowers, too:

We also found a large patch of leaves that looked like those of columbine spreading across part of the front garden where little else grows in front of the shrubs. Now that they're flowering, they continue to look like columbines, and I think they're a variety called Clementine White.

The previous occupants of our house hired landscapers to take care of the garden, and someone in the past had professionals plan it all, so that there are lots of pretty, healthy shrubs and small trees (for which I am grateful; my last garden had to be hacked out of a thicket of half-dead trees and blackberry bushes and overgrown shrubs, so it was nice to start off with good bones in this garden).

They mainly covered open areas with layers of black bark, with the exception of one small area near the deck where someone planted a nice little garden of groundcovers and some daisies. I'm planning to slowly replace a lot of the bark with groundcovers elsewhere in the yard.

One nice surprise is an avenue of ferns that the landscaping crews were no doubt told to remove every spring, because they weren't here when we moved in but are now growing vigorously in a strip of stones bordering the deck. I think they're Lady's Ferns.

Ferns pop up all over the place, and I've added a bunch of ferns from the nursery (as part of the groundcover master plan). After taking a few books out of the library about ferns, I felt myself ready to go haring off in search of rare ferns and desirous of setting up a large upturned root section from a Douglas-fir in order to build a stumpery, the fern-garden setup that those crazy Victorians went mad for. Had to steel myself because It's Not Like I Don't Have Other Things I Must Be Doing. For now I'll just enjoy the built-in Douglas-fir stump sitting in the yard, and the huckleberry tree and ferns and moss growing on it.

Treasure Trove of Trilliums

Vivid bouquets of flowers bedazzled this sunny Mother's Day weekend, showing up like unexpected flamenco dancers on the back deck. The chilly, rain-soaked weekend before this one offered a herbaceous banquet of a different sort, filled with native plants and greenery that flourished in soggy settings.

We spent that Saturday dodging downpours, slathered with mud as we dug up ferns on the forested property of friends whose home and gardens will soon be bulldozed to make way for a housing development. They also pointed out a few other dig-worthy plants--rhubarb, raspberries, heavenly bamboo--that it seemed a pity to leave behind. We drove home in a minivan packed with our new fronds (it's not easy to make new friends in a new neighborhood; fronds are quite a bit easier to come by).

The Sunday of that soggy weekend I enjoyed an early Mother's Day gift to myself: a "Tea and Trilliums" talk and tour at Cottage Lake Gardens, which is tucked right behind the library barely five minutes from my home.

Cottage Lake Gardens is perched on the shore of, not surprisingly, Cottage Lake, and is home to all of the world's 48 species of trillium, a lovely genus of wildflower native to North America and parts of Asia. Trilliums are named for their habit of sprouting threesomes: They have three leaves, three sepals (those green bits that surround the base of a flower), and three petals.

Tea, coffee, pastries, and fruit served up on antique Limoges china...I could've stopped right there. That was enough of a break from the daily grind.

Then, fortified with food as well as information about trilliums, we headed out into the rain to wend our way through the forested garden. There the trilliums reposed in groups along a meandering path, sharing the landscape with a wide variety of shade-loving plants.

What I found most fascinating about the trillium is just what a late bloomer it is. Not in terms of the season, mind you--it's one of the earliest bloomers when it comes to springtime (one of its nicknames is "wake-robin," because it's such an early riser it even wakes up the robin who's supposed to be the harbinger of spring). No, its peculiar late-blooming property is that about seven years pass before a trillium seed finally grows up enough to produce a flower.

The bulk of the plant takes the form of an underground, swollen stem called a rhizome. (If you've ever brought home a chunk of ginger from the grocery store, you've purchased a rhizome.)

Shoots from the rhizome poke up from the soil, with each shoot producing three leaves and a flower.

The flowers bloom for a few weeks, set seed, and are done for the season by the time other flowers are just thinking of getting out of bed.

This long adolescence and brief bloom, combined with the leaves' inclination to die back in dormancy during a hot, dry summer, puts an interesting spin on the whole notion of what, exactly, a plant is.

To the aboveground-dwelling human, a plant is leaves, flowers, fruit--the things we can see.

But I'd think a trillium would feel otherwise, if it had feelings. Its real self is a mole-like being that puts up a periscope of a flower and goes on a sunshine-buying spree with its leaves before returning to its underground digs and retiring with a brandy and a nice collection of books for the rest of the year.

First-year shoots (left) and older shoots (right)

It put me in mind of a 17-year cicada, which spends 17 years underground as a nymph, sipping from roots. Finally it bursts from the ground, climbs up a trunk, molts into its adult form, then spends about a month carousing, reproducing, dodging predators, and making a row before dying.

A cicada's short above-ground life seems puzzling to humans, but a trillium would understand it. It's the 17 years of subterranean life that's the real thing, not the brief party in the light of day.

Cicadas don't consort with trilliums, but other insects do. Pollinators of trilliums include beetles and ants. (An East Coast species, the red trillium, attracts these animals with a pungent odor that earns it charming nicknames such as “stinking Benjamin.") The most commonly encountered trillium in the Pacific Northwest, Trillium ovatum, puts on quite a show after it's been pollinated: Its lovely white petals turn increasingly deep shades of pink, transforming into a rich, velvety purple before the flower dies.

Beetle on wild trillium in a Redmond park

The plant offers ants not only protein bars in the form of pollen grains as reimbursement for pollination services, but also oily fast food attached to its seeds. These treats are called elaiosomes and are nutritious, calorific growths on the seeds.

Ants eagerly tote the seeds away from the trillium to share with larvae. The kids gobble up the elaiosomes while their indulgent elders toss the seeds on their own nutrient-rich junk piles outside the nest.

The trillium seeds, in a nice "Br'er Rabbit and the Briar Patch" twist, then happily take root in these middens. Pretty clever for a rhizome!

New Garden, Full of Surprises

Though our family near and far currently endures a measure of misfortune and illness, and a fog of shell-shocked weariness engulfs us, the beauty of spring still has the power to startle and delight--especially as it's our first spring in our new home and so we get to enjoy weekly surprise parties courtesy of the perennials, shrubs, and trees as they bloom.

Somebody planted this place with azaleas and rhododendrons in dazzling shades of purple...

...and red. The delicate interiors of the flowers are just as lovely as the vivid petals.

Sprightly little plants also spring up uninvited, but welcome; here's a pansy that's
quite at home in the paving stones of a path to the back deck.
It's completely unfazed by the dog galloping over it daily.

I had no idea a graceful bleeding-heart adorned the slope out front
by the culvert that catches runoff water until suddenly there it was, in full bloom, dangling its pink earrings in the breeze.

A magnolia topping out at about 15 feet grows outside my office window.
It looks as if it's holding hundreds of white bone-china teacups up to the sky.

The central parts of a magnolia blossom look like something out of a Chihuly glass exhibit. The green-gold tentacles are the pistils, or seed-producing parts; the pink fingerlike structures are the pollen-producing stamens. Beetles and bees are the pollinators.

This small plant grows in ground-covering clusters in the shade.
It grows so well that I was sure it was either a nice native plant
or a horrible invasive non-native that Washington State law
would mandate must be dug up and destroyed.
After some research, I learned that it's a variety of
Spotted Dead Nettle (nice name, yeah) and that,
though there's a black sheep in the family called "white nancy,"
this purple variety hasn't been singled out as an invader.

Last autumn's leaves form a still life in the bird bath along with catkins from this spring's growth.

Kitty came with us from our last home. She now dozes on soft moss,
sprinkled by fir needles and cherry blossoms.

We lugged our rhubarb plants with us, too.
They'll have a year to settle in before we harvest them again.

Hooray for Spring!

Monkeyshines in the Rockery

When a mystery plant pops up in the garden, it feels like a bonus Christmas day. True, sometimes the plant turns out to be the equivalent of coal in the stocking (like the time the seemingly delicate orchid in my garden turned out to be the highly invasive noxious exotic Himalayan balsam). More often the plant is a pleasant surprise, like a patch of feverfew or a tintinnabulation of Canterbury bells.

But sometimes it's definitely more like receiving an especially charming gift. That's how I felt when I saw this little wisp of yellow flowers growing out of a crevice in the rockery out front. I first noticed it last year and finally got a chance to look at it more closely when it sprouted again this year.

I hadn't planted it in this seemingly inauspicious spot. And usually the only wild plants that get a foothold in the rockery are ferns (welcome) and horsetails gone haywire (unwelcome). It looked so delicate it seemed improbable that it could muscle out a little space for itself in this rocky, sunbaked wall.

But Phinney Hill does have a multitude of underground springs trickling through it. They gurgle above ground in some places (a nearby street  has a channel down one side specifically to allow the spring to flow downhill into a storm drain). Many of the plants that appear to be growing in unlikely places are tapping into this hidden source of moisture, which is why lush ferns are able to grow at the base of our rockery.

A bit of research reveals that the little yellow blossoms appear to be a kind of monkey-flower, probably Yellow Monkey-Flower, Mimulus guttatus, and that it's not at all surprising that it thrives in the rockery: it is a plant that likes to grow in "wet ledges, crevices, weeping rock faces, seepage areas, along streams, near springs, on gravel bars, in wet ditches and clearings," according to the book Plants of the Pacific Northwest.

It got its odd name, according to this book, because apparently the flowers have "grinning, apelike faces" in the eyes of some beholders. The genus name, Mimulus, echoes this observation: it refers to a buffoon or "actor in a farce or mime."

Monkey-flowers have been introduced into European gardens, particularly one variety that exudes a musky scent. Some varieties thrive in such inhospitable settings as zones splashed by salty Pacific spray and the lips of steaming Yellowstone geysers. Because of the amazing array of forms this genus takes, yellow monkey-flowers serve as the equivalent of fruit flies in evolutionary studies, helping to tease out the intricacies of genetic variation and inheritance.

Native Americans used the plant's leaves to make teas and ate them, raw or cooked, in their meals. Explorers and "settlers" picked up on this use of the plant, too.

When Lewis and Clark encountered monkey-flowers in their western travels, they added them to their stash of samples to bring back East. Lewis specifically added yellow monkey-flowers he collected along the Clarks River, a tributary of the Blackfoot River, in Montana on July 4, 1806.

Today, that little flowers resides in the Lewis & Clark Herbarium at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. It is probably one of the world's most adventurous monkey-flowers: According to the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks website, "Lewis's collection of common monkeyflower traveled over Lewis & Clark Pass, down the Missouri River and eventually made its way to St. Louis and then to Philadelphia."

After reading that, I feel as if the monkey-flower growing in my rockery is puffing itself up and saying, like Pigpen in regard to the cloud of dust around him upon hearing it may be soil that was trod on by Nebuchadnezzar, "Sort of makes you want to treat me with more respect, doesn't it?"

All Summer In a Day, Seattle Style

Kerria flowers in bloom in garden.

"It had been raining for seven months; dozens of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Seattle, and this was the life of the men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives."

With deepest apologies to Ray Bradbury. But really, after a Seattle winter, one feels an awful lot like Margot locked in the closet.

So it was with hopeful and astonished delight that we soggy, mossy denizens of the Pacific Northwest saw the sun rise and yea, verily, shine upon us starting on Friday and continuing pretty much nonstop through Easter Sunday.

This makes us stop and take pictures of blue sky and the sun shining on things because we just can't believe it's true. Plus it might not happen again any time soon. (Indeed, the gray is back today.)

Sure felt good.

Tulips for sale at local grocery store.

Django enjoying the sunlight.

Luna likewise basking.

Pebble gets her fair share of sunlight, too.

Happy Valentine's Day...That's All

Valentine's Day Roses from a past year

Luna Lovedog, birthday Feb. 14, Superhero

Heart of a Dianthus flower, spring 2012

Roses, neighborhood steps, 2011

Django the Art Cat, with 'heartwork' in bowl, date unknown

   

Yours truly, Valentine's Day dress, 1967