Showing posts with label tulips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tulips. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Balmy Breezes, Shivery Freezes and Rainy Days




The magnificent flowers of Tulip Magnolia (magnolia soulangeana) are sometimes lost to a late frost--but not this year!
                                                  
March never can seem to make up it's mind. It starts out in the morning shivering in a winter coat, and by noon it's shorts and a tee shirt. Two hours later and you're drenched in a sudden downpour, mixed with 3 inches of pea-sized hail and wind that litters the ground with thousands of tiny twigs and branches, usually just after you've just picked  up all of the debris from the last weather snit.Then the sun peeks out; Mother Nature laughing at her own perverse sense of humor (Not Funny, Mom!) and warms your body and soul , kissing you with fresh breezes and hugging you with the delicious scents of fresh flowers and moist earth.

Miniature daffodils
                                                                    
Tritellia, one of my favorite small spring bulbs
                                              
Peppermint stick (clusiana) tulips
                                                                 
The next day, you wake up to a skin of frost all over everything, the daffodils are shivering and the rhododendron leaves are curled up into slim fingers that makes you want to fit them out with mittens!  There's a promise of 70 degrees by Sunday, but.....are the promises going to be kept?

Butterbur (petasites) flowers come up before the leaves
                                    
Vinca minor atropurpurea with white grape hyacinth

Spores on moss

Woodland walk
                    
Hosta montana aureomarginata
                                                       
Lots of promises to keep.

"And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins."
--Swinburne


Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Spring Fireworks and Photo Ops

Spring comes to the Ozarks in skyrocket bursts, from the popping of crocus buds like silent firecrackers to the bright explosion of forsythia against a dark stone wall. Then the sparks of daffodils and tulips, glowing and intense, underscored by the softer, gentle notes of wildflowers. All of a sudden, rockets of magentas, pinks and bright white punctuate the glowing green background of the emerging trees, as redbuds, dogwoods, flowering cherry open almost before your eyes. There is nothing subtle about an Ozark spring!

Lunaria

Dicentra spectablilis, old-fashioned bleeding heart

Emerging dogwood blooms

Narcissus poeticus, "Poets" narcisus. A very old variety

Pretty pansy faces

Redbuds (cercis canadensis) everywhere

Wild pear

Everywhere you look is a "Kodak moment" with spring! I just can't seem to stop!

Luscious lips: wild ginger. "Give us a kiss?"

New oak leaves

Newly emerging maidenhair fern frond. How delicate!

Rhubarb! I foresee pie in the future!

Wasn't there supposed to be another rhubarb here? What ARE these things?
"Yeah, lady, we ate your rhubarb. Whadda ya gonna do aboudit?"

And the enemy....Poison Ivy (rhus radicans). Where is my Roundup?

Today is a beautiful, rain-washed morning after thundershowers last night. The sun is glowing, the petals of the tulip magnolia litter the deck like a bridal aisle, and I see that there are lilacs blooming and viburnum "Carlessi" is open today. I must go smell them!  


"Nature does her spring housecleaning
with rainclouds for her buckets
And the wind for her broom." --S.P.