Spring Moves Fast

Spring! The snowflakes are blooming!

Everything seems to happen at once here in the spring. One day, we're sitting around the pond, contemplating the skeletal wreck of our garden by the tawdry orange glow of the sulfur streetlights (I really hate those lights). The next day, there are snowflakes (the botanical kind--Leucojum sp.--not the meterological ones) and cemetery irises (Iris albicans), the roses are covered in tufts of red and bronzy leaves, and the crinums are poking their little green snouts out of the decaying remnants of last year's leaves.

...and the Montezuma cypress is putting out new leaves. It never actually dropped last year's dead leaves, curiously enough.

Meanwhile, Matt & I are sprinting to keep up. We recently finished the last of our trellises and cemented them in around the pond, and I hoed and raked and shaped the berm that will become our grass-n-roses bed.

Two of the new trellises, with two severely ailing 'Sky Pencil' hollies. I wouldn't have thought a holly would mind a wee bit of a freeze, but these were evidently feeling... fragile.

All three new trellises. Matt is in the process of de-rusting and painting our old iron stove.

We're trying to plant up the new beds (pond + grass-n-roses), tackle the bermudagrass (I hate that stuff worse than sulfur lights), mulch everything, and finish off the new front walkway to use up the pile of crushed granite leftover from the pond terrace. Oh, and repair and build on to our irrigation system.

It's a lot of stuff. Matt says we should take a break once we're done with that before buying more giant piles of mulch/dirt/sand/rocks that we then have to shovel somewhere. It's a radical proposition, but I have reluctantly agreed to give this a try.

In any event, today's installment was putting groundcloth under the new front walk, and shoveling as much sand and gravel was we could endure to hold it in place. (This turned out to not be as much gravel as it used to be. We're a lot older than we were about 4 months ago when we were last shoveling gravel. Ow. Gardening can be hard on the body.)

New front walk. The stones are not in their final configuration--just holding the groundcloth down.

We also planted a 'Red Fountain' rose on one of the pond trellises, placed a 'Puerto Rico' to block the right side of the AC unit, moved a misplaced 'Paul Neyron,' and planted three Lindheimer's muhly (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri) in the grass-n-roses bed (which is nice, because now it's a proper "grass-n-roses" bed instead of, as before, just an "n-rose" bed, containing exactly one 'Mrs. Dudley Cross' rose--and a heaping pile of bermudagrass.)

A Lindheimer's muhly in the new grass-n-roses bed. And, in the lower left corner, the inevitable bermudagrass. Ug.