Spring! Spring! Spring!

It's not yet Peak Rose, but all sorts of things are booming and sprouting and leafing out.

For example, 'Hot Cocoa' is putting on this season's first flowers.  Believe it or not, this is actually an accurate depiction of the color.  Matt hates it, but I find it strange and entrancing.  Even more than most roses, HC's color varies with the weather--cooler temperatures bring out the browny-silvery-lilacy tones that lurk under the orangey-red.

 

A lovely 'Hot Cocoa' bloom

'Green Rose' was one of our first roses to pop into bloom, and it's kept it up admirably.  Interesting, as the "flowers" fade, they turn kind of straw-colored, which is the only time they're terribly visible. 

'Green Rose'--what can I say? We like floral oddities.

Meanwhile, Tulipa clusiana 'Tinka' materialized almost overnight. I had no idea they had even sprouted, when suddenly, they were in full bloom.  Unlike many T. clusianas, this cultivar has warm golden yellow accents.

T. clusiana 'Tinka'

The Iris virginiana slip that I bought 2-3 years ago from Madrone Nursery has finally bloomed.  It's a long, leggy thing, with a bright blue bloom.

Iris virginiana--purportedly, an unusually salt-tolerant variety, which will come in handy when the sea levels rise, but not much before

Poppies!  Last year we sowed whole heap of Papaver somniferum from my Aunt P. I think we maybe got one small, sad bloom? Not a good year for the wildflowers--beastly drought.  But this year, all of last year's frustrated seeds went nuts, and we have an impenetrable thicket of poppies. I've been checking on them (almost) daily, but one managed to bloom without my seeing it. Nevermind--there are about 50 more buds in on the way.

A blue-green forest of poppies, heavy with buds

'Mlle Franziska Kruger'--I'm not actually nuts about the quilled, wadded look that Mlle FK specializes in, but the colors are so very pretty--she's almost as changeable as Mutabilis.

One of Mlle Franziska Kruger's scrunched up flowers

And I caught 'Isabella Sprunt' about 30 seconds too late.  Her flowers spend a long time as slender, elegant, very Tea-ish buds, then open into quite elegant and formal blooms... for about 5 minutes.  After which they turn into this rather untidy thing, and by the next day, half the petals will have dropped.  Still, that pale butter color is nice.  But if you have to choose between them, don't hesitate: go with 'Ducher.'

The mayfly-like flowers of 'Isabella Sprunt'

It seems like every spring, a different rose delights and surprises me.  This year, it's 'Kaiserin Friedrich.'  As a climber, she goes straight up--long, straight, limbs that withstand bending and weaving better than the average rose (I hate it when you're trying to thread a rose through a trellis and you have to bend... bend... bend--and at the last minute, it snaps).  But her upward tendencies mean the blooms are a bit thin around her knees--she has (so far--we're in her 2nd year) few lateral branches to break into bloom.  However.  She has a decent load of blooms at the top, and I think she's starting to do a little more branching, so hopefully the trellis will fill in.  But above all, how nifty are these flowers?  Check out the ruffled margins on the petals of these buds.

The precisely fluted petals of two 'Kaiserin Friedrich' rose buds

They'd be fussy if it weren't for the obvious toughness and vitality of the plant itself.  And look at the lovely range of colors: cream to soft yellow to peach to pink with darker pink margins.  And that complex array of petals!  It brings a real touch of sophistication to our otherwise rough-and-tumble DIY sort of a garden.

A fully open 'Kaiserin Friedrich' blossom

Spring: An Ambivalent Appreciation

Spring is so complicated. My allergies have been bad enough to completely incapacitate me after yardwork two Sundays running, and Claritin can't begin to keep up. On the other hand, everything is so wonderfully densely green and juicy and pulsing with vitality. I can't decide if I hate or love this time of year.

Meanwhile, roses are popping into bloom all over the place. 'Fourth of July' is putting on its first buds. Matt, who hates moderns, grumbles about this viciously thorny rose a lot, so I'm doubly glad to see it bodying forth its streaky red awesomeness. FOJ: more than just a bad-ass lethal ninja weapon.

'Fourth of July'

'Madame Alfred Carriere' is just starting to bloom up on the gazebo. It's sporting a number of foamy pink blossoms, although when it comes to the gazebo, the flower bedizened 'Climbing Old Blush' is really where it's at right now. OB's individual flowers, though, can't compare to the delicacy and refinement of Mme AC's.

'Madame Alfred Carriere'

'Isabella Sprunt,' which is a comparatively new addition to the garden (planted last fall, I think), has put out a number of its unusually long, narrow buds, which prefigure the elongated buds of the hybrid teas. They open to pretty pale lemon blossoms.

'Isabella Sprunt'

Both of the 'Archduke Charles' that we planted last year are sporting many Valentine-colored pink-on-pink flowers. Part of me finds this combination a little too twee, but most of me thinks the overall effect is rather spectacular. Look at all those flowers on this little bitty shrub!

'Archduke Charles'

And then there's 'Sombreuil,' a big favorite of my husband's. We're growing it on one of the new trellises for privacy around the pond, and we ended up buying a rather expensive 5-gallon from It's a Jungle that had been trained up a plant stake. At the time, we weren't very happy about this, but it was the only 'Sombreuil' in town. Once we got it uncoiled and woven into the trellis, though, it was obvious that the extra $20 or so was totally worth it. It already fills out the trellis nicely, and it immediately popped into bloom, with several large, densely petaliferous, fragrant disk-like flowers.

'Sombreuil'

So that's spring in Central Texas: bursting with loveliness and color... that I can only see through bleary, itchy, inflamed eyes.

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.

Springliness

'Purple Robe' black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia)

Things move fast in the spring, and there's much to report, garden-wise.

The Pond is Carpeted
We ordered up 3 cu.yds. of sand from good ol' Bert's Dirts on Thursday. That's way more sand than we needed for the pond (by about 2.25 cu.yds.), but we've got a big walkway to lay down, plus we need to take up the kitchen patio and re-lay it properly. So that sand won't go to waste.

In any event, we put 1-2" on all of the pond's horizontal surfaces as a cushion/protection against sharp pointy things. Then we spread out our carpet remnants and the ones given us by our nice neighbor, Ms. D. Even our combined remnants were not enough, but another neighbor, Mr. H., dropped by to offer us his carpet remnants, so now I think we're solid. How lucky was that?--2 different neighbors had spare carpet at just the time we needed it.

The carpet (fuzzy side up) is our cheapola underlayment. I'm hoping this week to lay out the (painfully large pile of) ooftish for the 45 mm rubber liner. Which is pretty darn exciting--after a month or so of it being a stagnant mudhole, we're on the cusp of turning this pond thing around.

There will almost certainly be a series of further delays once we have the plastic down: we'll need to look into pumps/filters, that lovely fountain I want, fish, plants, a rock edging, getting electricity out to the pond to run everything, and in the very vague and distant future, a crushed granite terracey-thing and lighting around the edges. Oh, and landscaping all around.

But I think that by next weekend it will at least contain water, which will be pretty cool too. Our 'Purple Robe' blacklocust (Robinia pseudoacacia) is just starting to bloom with great plummy, languid, wisteria-like blossoms--how lovely to have them hanging gracefully over the water!

Rose Season Begins in Earnest
The best of the bunch: still 'Ducher,' a dense green shrub absolutely head to toe in pretty lemony-white rosettes.

'Ducher,' laden with blooms

Other goodies: Second best is probably 'Duchesse de Brabant,' with 'Georgetown Tea' close behind. Reliable and graceful 'Duchesse' bears many fairly uniform bowls of clear pink, while GT's blooms are constantly mutable and surprising--each a different shade or combination of shades of pink, and their shapes ranging from pointy proto-hybrid-teas to Bourbonesque cabbages.

A particularly cabbagey "Georgetown Tea"

Viewed from up the street, one of 'Cramoisi Superieurs' is superimposed on top of 'Duchesse'--I'm surprised at how much I like the combination of colors. Cramoisi is a dark pinky-purply red, and Duchesse is a bright middle pink--you'd think the combination would be revoltingly Valentinesy, but for whatever reason (perhaps the unfussy nature of these two roses?), it's really just very, very harmonious.

Lovely and amazing 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' has put on its first blooms--great, huge cabbagey things in the most restrained pale pink possible.

'Climbing Old Blush' is just starting to pop--the gazebo is positively roofed with rosebuds, and I'm very much looking forward to the full show.

'Climbing Old Blush' blooming on the gazebo

Also, the hedge of 'Mutabilis' roses is in full flower. Most of the pictures I took came out lousy, but the color was surprisingly good on this one:

A young 'Mutabilis' rose

Payoff
Some of last year's plants are putting on their first proper show. The last of the cemetery irises are still in bloom, and to my surprise the Drimiopsis and a wood violet both appear to be making a comeback.

The oak-leaf hydrangea that was so desolate all last year is full of new leaves and even its first flower buds. We bought a second OLH at the Peckerwood open house, and it's doing much better than the first, even though it's smaller--more flower buds and no sulky foliage. Not sure if this is due to weather or to an inherent superiority of the Peckerwood strain.

An oak-leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) bud

In addition, the columbine are taller and bushier than they were last year. The one below was a stowaway in the Japanese maple's pot, and now it looks like it's trying to strangle the poor maple.

Columbines smothering a Japanese maple

And the 'Purple Robe' black locust is rewarding us again with gorgeous panicles of plummy, fragrant flowers. It's odd that you don't see more of these around. Funny to think that we got it by chance and just chunked it in the ground to see. And now it's giving us so much gorgeousness.

'Purple Robe' black locust

New Plants
We bought a couple of 'Archduke Charleses' in our recent visit to the Antique Rose Emporium--they're already full of flowers, a bit bigger than Cramoisi's. They're going to make a little hedge to bracket the far end of the kitchen patio--it currently just sort of peters out in this rather disheartening way.

Blossoms on our new 'Archduke Charles'

We also picked up a blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium sp.) I had bought two 4" BEG at the LBJ Wildflower plant sale, but they are kinda scraggley, weedy things with tiny, pale blooms. The one from ARE has tidier, more attractive foliage and larger, deep indigo blooms. I wish I'd bought more.

SO MUCH STUFF is happening

Spring in the Shade Garden

A Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) leafs out

Today is brisk! The Sunset Valley Farmer's Market had less than half its usual stalls, and everyone there looked frostbitten and miserable. An veritable mistral is blowing--the guy who runs the nursery up the road told Matt that his neighbor's metal roof blew off in the wind--just peeled right off. My fingers kept getting numb while I snapped pictures, but so much is going on that I couldn't stop.

For example, I'm shocked to discover that our Japanese maples aren't dead. Their leaves got progressively crispier last summer till they finally burned off completely. Perhaps they just needed to acclimate?

Last year, Matt dug up some mystery bulbs from his family's property on the Brazos River. Turns out, some of them were snowflakes. What is interesting is that the flowers look a bit different from our other snowflakes--slimmer, more flared, more deeply lobed, and with pointier lobes. A different cultivar? A different species? Or just different growing conditions (eastside vs westside gardens)?

A skinnier snowflake: Leucojum aestivum?

The shade garden is seeing a lot of action. Things are poking their little heads out of the ground, popping into bloom, and putting on new leaves. Look at the lovely bright greenness of this patch of inland sea oats, for example.

First flush of inland sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium)

Or look at the dark red of the shrimp plant we bought recently--particular grateful on such a forbiddingly grey day.

Dark red Justicia cultivar

Our 'New Dawn' abutilon finally put on a bunch of buds. I'm really impressed with abutilon--the weather's been incredibly capricious this month, but they're just blooming away merrily. There's a lot of vitality in these little plants.

A worm's eye view of Abutilon 'New Dawn'

Lots of Pictures of Trees in Bud
Our trees are full of buds and new leaves, which is always so reassuring. For example, after a very rocky summer, our Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) is recharged and ready to go.

Montezuma cypress by the pond

This Lacey oak (Quercus laceyi) is full of little pink flower-like rosettes of leaves.

One of our Lacey oaks, expressing its feminine side

And our new weeping baldcypress, 'Cascade Falls' is continuing to bud out with undiminished vigor, much to my relief. Transporting it home from Austin sticking out of the back of my little Insight was rather nerve-wracking, and I was concerned that it would be traumatized. Seems pretty well-adjusted so far.

A zillion tiny green nubbins on the 'Cascade Falls' baldcypress (Taxodium distichum)

The Roses Are Back!
We dug up the two 'Knockout' roses and gave them to our friends Cathy, Kate, & Keith (thanks again for taking them!). So now we have more room for antiques: Madame Jo, here we come.

And among the antiques, we're j-u-u-u-s-t starting to see some new blooms and lots and lots of buds. Look at the roof of the gazebo: 'Climbing Old Blush' is covered in buds.


And inside, one timid little blossom has already opened.

The season's first flower of 'Climbing Old Blush'

'Georgetown Tea' last year's earliest bloomer and a really fantastic many-petalled plant, tucked away its first flower for this year deep in the middle of itself.

Our first 'Georgetown Tea' blossom this year

Meanwhile, 'Ducher,' a rose I could never be brought to care about until I grew it myself, already has a good five or six blossoms and rafts of buds. After the indomitable miniature, 'Green Ice,' the redoubtable 'Ducher' is probably our garden's most floriferous rose--blooms early, blooms late, blooms often. And it has an easy, casual gracefulness, while nevertheless being surprisingly sturdy. Some roses are prone to bruises, browning, and insect damage, but 'Ducher' always looks fresh and bright and clean and slightly lemony. If Mrs Meyer's fancypants aromatherapeutic cleaning products came in rose form, they might look a little like 'Ducher.'

Darling 'Ducher'

Spring Planting & Tidying

It's definitely spring. It was in the 70s today, leaf buds are swelling, and flower buds are appearing. So it was time to do a little maintenance, and also to plant some things that have been kicking around in the greenhouse.

We weeded, cut back the dead branches of tender perennials, and raked out beds. Among the new plants were an Italian parsley (I'm not a fan of annuals, but you simply can't buy flat-leaf parsley in Elgin--I had no choice), "Berggarten" sage, and peppermint. Sage can be a bit whiny if it gets too much water, but that hasn't been a big problem here at Chez M lately.

'Berrgarten' sage. You'd think it'd be "biergarten," but no. 'Berrgarten.'

On the strictly ornamental side, I put a 1-gallon almond verbena (Aloysia virgata) behind the porch swing to add privacy and its lovely amaretto fragrance. The internet promises that it can take part shade--and surely the internet would never lie, right? I also added an Allardii lavender to keep last year's (now quite seedy) Spanish lavender company. More or less picked the cultivar at random--completely unscientific.

Lavandula allardii--the dark horse lavender

Matt planted a 'Paul Neyron' rose by the A/C unit, an 'Isabella Sprunt' in the pole bed, and a mystery rose by the chitalpa. This was definitely a good choice--I hadn't realized how scrawny the A/C bed looked until we filled it in a little.

'Red' verbena. No shit.

I also put a picnic-red verbena by the front door (cultivar name? 'Red.' Creative, no?), and added another Ipheion uniflorum under the chitalpa. Matt let me add his 'Black and Blue' salvia to the Blue & Purple bed, which will hopefully help to give the bed a finished look. We also put in a purple aster, so that bed doesn't look so miserably neglected.

Ipheion uniflorum--Starflower. Originally from Argentina.

Only the (blech) 'Pink Knockout' (TM) is currently in bloom, though Souvenir de la M, Duchesse de B, and Georgetown Tea all have buds.

Coming Alive

The garden on the whole is still in that frowsy, twiggy, in-between state prior to completely embracing spring. However, there are individual signs of spring all over.

Let's start with the best news: the baldcypress lives! This comes as a pleasant surprise. Chuck, my father-in-law, liberated it from an atrocious tree-butcher outside of Hempstead who had hacked off most of the cypress's roots and crammed it into a little bitty plastic pot. Then we planted it. In June. ("You mean the June at the beginning of what has been called the worst drought in Texas since the catastrophic drought of 1956?" Yes. That June.) The baldcypress didn't care for our La Niña weather pattern at all. It dropped most of its leaves and then, most disturbingly, it sort of crumpled. It had been nice and straight, but now it's bent and sad, as though its insides dried out so cataclysmically that they sucked the bole crooked. All winter, we've been scraping back bits of bark, trying to spot green (to see if it's "wick," as Dickon explains to Mary in The Secret Garden.)

And now look!

Baldcypress buds

See those tiny dots on the stems? They weren't there a week ago. They're leaf buds! He's moving a bit slowly compared to most everything else in the yard. But a brain-damaged baldcypress is better than no baldcypress at all. Maybe with time he'll straighten up, leaf out, and make us all proud.

Speaking of the Robinia ('Purple Robe' black locust), check it out--it's got flower buds. In a week or so, it should be covered in wine-colored racemes, very much like wisteria, but plummier.

Robinia pseudoacacia buds

In other tree news, the red oak (Quercus buckleyi) is living up to its name and is covered in red baby leaves. Here's a funny thing: when the leaves first appear, they are sharply angled down, looking like severely reflexed flowers. As the leaves mature, they float upright. In their baby stage, they remind me of the flowers in the Fantasia version of the Dance of the Mirlitons from the Nutcracker. In the picture below, the leaves are out of the infant stage and are toddling about, drooling on things.

New leaves on the Texas red oak Quercus buckleyi)

I'm also on the cusp of discovering just what I've got in Japanese maples. I got them very, very cheap, but down side is that I had no way to tell if they are green, red, or purple. Naturally, I'm hoping for at least one red or purple, but I keep reminding myself that even green would be cheap at the price I paid. Thus far, the new leaves look red, but then so do baby leaves on Q. buckleyi.

A new Japanese maple leaf. Is it really purple, or is this just a phase?

And these little fellows are gathered around the feet of the maple above. They're native columbines, which, with their tightly vertical spurs, make me think of flaming meteorites.

Blooming native columbine (Aquilegia something-or-other)

..And enough of these lesser plants. On to the roses!

The mutabilis, as is their wont, are kicking butt.

Mutabilis flower

I'm especially pleased with how 'Ducher' is turning out, particularly given that I didn't give a toss about this cultivar when Matt brought one home. I chunked it in the pole bed and wished it well and barely gave it another thought. Now look at it. Lots of buds, dark green foliage, and fat lemony flowers that glow in the low light on the east side of the house.

Ducher. It's actuall a little more lemony rather than creamy, as it appears in the pic.

Meanwhile, after a disappointing first year, Duchesse de Brabant is finally living up to its potential--lots of bowl-shaped pink flowers on a good-sized shrub. Unfortunately, as they face west, they can be difficult to photograph.

Nice, big bloom on Ducher

At the same time, rookie Souvenir de la Malmaison --still quite a small plant, having been purchased in October--has several large, heavy, cabbagey flowers in varying states of bloom.
Fully open Souvenir de la Malmaison

Younger S. de la Malmaision bloom

S. de la Malmaison bud

And, once more, the unknown-tea-that-might-be-Monsieur-Tillier puts on one of its large, many-petaled flowers.

M. Tillier? Who knows?