Scented purples

My carport is cut into the side of a hill. So when I come home and step out of the car, the hyacinths greet me at nose level.

A perfumed welcome

Too heavy for their stalk.

Zooming in. So purple!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mi casa está situada en un cerro, y la cochera está medio bajo el nivel del suelo. Así que, cuando llego a casa y salgo del coche, doy con la nariz a mis jacintos, con su perfume. ¡Tan acogedor!

Alyssum

I planted alyssum five years ago. It still comes back, year after year, and blooms until the snow falls. A white froth beside the wall, tiny four-petalled flowers from up close.

Sweet Alyssum, Lobularia maritima

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sembré esta planta, Lobularia maritima, conocida como alisón fragrante, hace cinco años. Vuelve a crecer cada año, sin cuidado alguno, y produce flores hasta que la cubre la nieve en invierno. Parece una espuma blanca al lado de la pared, pero de cerca (muy de cerca) son pequeñas florecitas con cuatro pétalos.

May morning

Reviewing last year's photos on a rainy evening, in a melancholy mood after a lonely party, I came across this photo of my garden last May. Just what I needed!

Columbine, with London Pride, hostas, and pachysandra in the background.

It's been a difficult year, losing Laurie, and then leaving everything behind to come here. But spring is coming soonish, and gardens are healing. I've cleaned out the small garden plot here, ripping out a barrel of weeds, to find the mud full of bulbs. I don't know what they are, but now they're all sprouting. Life goes on.

And this garden will have sunshine! And winters are for browsing seed catalogs! Time to start making lists of perennials. Columbines and cosmos, daffs and azalea ... And some ferns for Laurie: I know just where they'll do nicely.

A mouthful of centipedes

Rows of spores on a hart's-tongue fern in Laurie's shade garden.

Asplenium scolopendrium, I think.

A cluster of spores makes up a sorus, from the ancient Greek for "pile, heap". In the hart's-tongue, the sori are long rows; in our common native ferns, they're round dots. These long sori reminded somebody of a centipede, so the fern was named, in Latin, for a centipede: "scolopendrium".

(They look more like caterpillars to me, but according to the naming conventions, the first person to describe a plant or critter gets to name it.)

Here's the whole fern. And the fronds are supposed to look like deer's tongues. With centipedes on the underside.

The imagination boggles.

Pink and white

Laurie's Daphne is blooming again!

I love the rumpled buds.

These plants are slow starters, and picky about their conditions, to boot. And Laurie planted his at the wrong time of year, then it had a difficult winter, too much water in the summer, and no care this winter at all. I'm surprised to see it still growing.

They are supposed to be extremely fragrant, but I haven't noticed any scent. I just discovered why:

The scent is so thick that on warmer days it can envelop a neighborhood. (From Portland Nursery)

Oh. We haven't had any "warmer days". Not even warm days. I'll wait for a sunny afternoon, and check again.

On the wall

First day of snow this year. It's melting already tonight.

And first winter for this black squirrel.

"Can't see me! I'm hiding behind this pile of white stuff."

The green vine is sausage vine. A shade-loving, cool-climate evergreen. Maybe it will produce fruit one of these years.

Cold weather haven

The weather has turned cold this week. At night, the thermometer dips below freezing. Where the sun shines in the daytime, it warms up, but in my shady garden, the bird bath stays frozen all day and even my winter-hardy bergenias and primulas have wilted.

Chickadees come to my door early, calling to me; "Hurry up with our breakfast!" They've got a busy day ahead, getting enough to eat to stoke their tiny furnaces overnight. After them, come the juncos and a towhee or two, poking around in the frozen earth, looking for anything edible, mostly tiny weed seeds. In my garden, the native bleeding hearts bloomed just before frost; their black seeds were ripening this week. The astilbes, the heather, and the lemon balm were still dropping seeds, too.

The smaller animals have gone into hiding. There are no slugs to be found, even under flowerpots and heavy leaves. No sowbugs. No beetles. Spiders have crawled into crevices: the babies have hatched and ballooned away. The bees and wasps are gone. I saw one harvestman a couple of days ago, and a small moth last week. It's winter. The sleepy season.

I needed a piece of lumber for a small repair, and remembered I had a plank propped against the wall in the corner of the patio, behind the compost bin. I moved the bin and retrieved it. And was surprised to see small things (and some not so small) scuttle off in all directions. It's not winter yet in that protected corner.

A couple of fair-sized spiders came along with the board.

Mid-sized Tegenaria. If you look closely, you can see that the surface of the wood is covered with spider webs.

A plump cobweb spider, probably Steatoda sp. The frass on the left includes a spider leg, either the remains of a molt, or of her unfortunate mate.

Neither of these two wanted to leave their warm board. I shooed them off, and they ran to the edge and over to the underside. I flipped the board, and they moved to the new underside. Again, and again. I finally convinced them by brushing and shaking the board vigorously, and they scooted down the side of the compost bin. There's still another board back there; they've got a few weeks more before the cold reaches them there.

Rainbow leaves

They come in every colour but blue. But for that, we have skies.

One of Laurie's hostas, under a mulch donated by the trees overhead.

This one turned up by the back door, blown in from a neighbour's tree.

Detail of dead maple leaf

Sunlight through sweet gum leaves and seed pods. At the mall.

Now that the flowers are gone

A tribe of rhododendron leafhoppers provide sparks of colour:

I love the yellow comb legs.

Bees, beetle, and Joe Pye weed

Our summer is starting to wind down. It's still hot in the afternoons, but the temperature drops at night; tonight it's down to 12°C (53 F). Some of the flowering plants in our garden have given up for the year. The maples are dropping their winged seeds, which are quickly snatched up by a fat little black squirrel. The slugs had gone into hiding while the nights were hot, but they're back, chomping great holes in hosta leaves and leaving trails of slime across the pathways.

We went down to our local plant nursery to see what's happening there. It's more of the same; most of the flowers are gone, shrubs are straggly and yellowing, trees are setting fruit. And workmen are everywhere, getting the place ready for Hallowe'en. (Already!)

Many of the plants are at half price, so we loaded up with perennials that will settle in this winter and be ready to go by spring; ferns, heather, lavender, evergreen sedums.

I stopped at a stand of Joe Pye weed, looking like tattered pink mop heads, and buzzing with excited bees.

So very pink, even the stems.

A big bee, sprinkled with pollen

Neat little bee

Two bees here. Some of the flowers are still in bud.

I walked the aisles, comparing the bug populations; on other plants there were wasps and flies, but all the bees were here on the Joe Pye weed. One of the staff told me that when they were moving the plants out of the building site, they put all the Joe Pye weed on a wagon together. When they hauled it to the new location, a cloud of bees followed it all the way.

On another plant, half fallen over and unlabelled, I found this tiny beetle:

4 mm. long. Probably one of the sap-feeding beetles.

I couldn't find it on BugGuide, so I've requested an ID.

UPDATE: From BugGuide, "Twenty-Spotted Lady Beetle, Psyllobora vigintimaculata, or something close." And from the comments (Upupaepops): Western Psyllobora Lady Beetle, Psyllobora borealis. Which is so close I can't really tell the difference.

Begonia. And Canada Day.

White is such a wonderful colour for deep shade; it glows even when the sun doesn't.

Small begonias in a hanging basket with bacopas.

And it's Canada Day; happy interrupted* long weekend, fellow Canadians!

*(Canada Day, July 1st is a Statutory Holiday. All public institutions close; those who have to work get double pay; most of us are heading out of town or to the nearest beach. When it falls on or next to a weekend, we get 3 days off, rather than 2.  And when the Stat. Holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, as it does this year, we often make it a 4 day weekend, long enough to go for a decent road trip. But some employers stick to the letter of the law, and make Monday a normal working day, which gives people 2 days off, one day on, one day off. Much grumbling.**)

** Since we're retired, we don't care; we work every day, or not, as it pleases us. Our plans for the holiday this year include gardening (mostly Laurie), chasing spiders with the camera (me), and maybe de-cluttering the storeroom (me) and old documents (Laurie). We'll head for the beach another day, when it's not so crowded.

Pink and white

Dutchman's breeches in my deep shade garden:

Dicentra spectabilis var. "Alba"

Laurie has the sunny side, and his "Breeches" are pink:

Now re-named Lamprocapros spectabilis

These are also known as Bleeding Heart; they're a relative of our native woodland Dicentra formosa. Other names include Lady's locket, Lyre flower, and Lady in the Bath.

Freckled viola

Every year, just as the rowdy rhododendrons burst into bloom, shouting down the quiet bleeding hearts and cheerful primulas, I defy them and turn instead to watch the shadiest spot in my garden, where the shyest of the shy violas, the tiny Freckled viola, will be tiptoeing out into the light.

Viola sororia, "Freckles", the "sister viola"

It's a small plant, no more than my open hand's width high. Most of the summer, it's a modest clump of leaves, but just now, its tiny flowers peep out from underneath, open briefly, and disappear, to set seed out of sight under the green roof.

The flowers look downwards, hiding their faces; to see them properly, you have to match them in humility, down on your knees in the London Pride, down at mud level. They're worth it.

Almost open. I'll look again tomorrow.

I've had these some 10 years. They disappear over the winter, but are some of the first to revive when the weather warms. I started with one small plant; each year it spreads a bit more, and now there are three plants, each a little more than a foot across.

Rain and mud and flowers

It's been pouring rain again, keeping the birdbath full and the pathways muddy, keeping us looking out the window at garden work to be done when and if it ever dries out. In my shade garden, winter-demolished plants are lifting their heads, putting out new, optimistic growth. The primulas are covered with flowers now, white and yellow, and all spattered with mud. Laurie's lupins, planted from seed last year,are almost six inches high already. (The ones I planted in the semi-shade barely made it through last summer; I don't expect to see them again.)

Baby lupins on the last sunny day

And after budding, being frozen back to the ground, growing and budding again, and being frozen yet again, the various hellebores have rebounded, as if that's the sort of winter they were expecting. One in the semi-sunny garden is in full bloom, even though the plant itself is short; this is its first spring.

I had to clean off some mud, of course. Quite a bit of mud, actually.

And last year Laurie kept saying he wanted a Daphne, and finally found a small one near the end of the summer. I couldn't see his point: the flowers are tiny, stiff-looking, and dwarfed by the leaves; the sap may irritate skin, and they're prone to a variety of diseases like root rot, yellowing, and leaf browning. And they should be planted in the spring, anyhow!

I've changed my mind.

Waxy flowers in a rosette of leathery leaves.

Yes, I see the brown spot. And the yellowing of the leaves. But the buds started forming while everything else was still frozen, and now they're fully open, while the other plants are barely getting started. And the flowers are high enough to be out of the mud, too!

More: reading up on these, they're supposed to be fragrant. I hadn't realized, and so I didn't bend down to take a sniff. As soon as it stops raining, I'll remedy that.

Hints of spring already

This afternoon was unseasonably warm, and not even raining, so I took the chance of doing a bit of gardening, intending mostly to cut out plants that had been killed by the sudden, extreme (for here) cold spell in December. Cutting down the first one, I found new green leaves sprouting at the base. The next was better still, with flower buds forming already. And the next ...

All I had to do was clean away dead leaves and stems, and the garden is a garden again.

Hellebore bud. This one, last year, was a deep purple. It may darken as it grows.

Of the evergreen perennials, the primulas and pachysandra are already in flower; the hellebores are well on the way. The sausage vine and the bergenia which had seemed to be dying are back to normal; the salal and heather, sweet William and, of course, the London Pride, don't seem to have noticed the crazy weather. A half-dead Epimedium that I transplanted last fall seems to have been invigorated by the chill; it's better now than it ever was.

And this was completely unexpected; an Italian parsley plant that I planted as an annual, didn't protect from the cold because it was due to die anyhow, and left exposed in the coldest part of the garden, barely lost a few stems and still fills its pot, still green.

The Dutchman's breeches are poking out of the soil, and the bare twigs of the hydrangea all boast a big bud at the tip.

All this makes me happy.

A hanging pot off in a corner, where I'd planted trailing nasturtiums and lobelia, and which had housed a volunteer fringe-cup a couple of years ago, was a complete mess, a tangle of old twigs, cedar droppings, and dead, crispy stems. I cleared it all out, and found the fringe-cup coming back underneath. The usually green leaves are red, probably because of the cold.

Fuzzy stems and leaves of the fringe-cup.

A closer look at the stem. A bug would call it spiky, not merely "fuzzy".

Wordless # 3

Nemesia

Japanese anemone

Anemone japonica or hupehensis, var Prince Henry

I bought this perennial about a month ago, and I'm really pleased with it. It stands about 2 feet tall, and is covered with flowers, more each day, even in September. It's sturdy; it never drooped under the weight of the storm the other day, nor did it lose any flowers.

It's supposed to naturalize and spread, but without becoming invasive. We'll see.

This flower has no petals; what looks like petals are really sepals.

And I love the round button in the centre.

Curves and colours

In a corner of the garden . . .

Voluptuous hosta leaves. With a visitor.

Rainbow tinted fly.

And a spider, patiently laying in wait on a sausage vine.

Dutchman's Breeches

From my garden . . .

A bright accent in the shade.

Dutchman's breeches is native to this area, although it is more common on the East coast. It is a Dicentra, closely related to our bleeding hearts and the tiny corydalis I sometimes find among weeds at the edge of the bush. Bleeding hearts also grow in my garden, but the breeches are a much larger plant (ours, from a nursery, are about 2 feet tall), and blooms throughout the summer, while the bleeding heart goes to seed early.

Corydalis, Beach Grove

It likes a good, rich, moist soil, and shady woodlands. Ours grow happily under pine and maple trees.

The plant can propagate itself by sending out new roots, but also sets seed in long seed pods, much prized by ants.

Dutchman's breeches is one of many plants whose seeds are spread by ants, a process called myrmecochory. The seeds have a fleshy organ called an elaiosome that attracts ants. The ants take the seeds to their nest, where they eat the elaiosomes, and put the seeds in their nest debris, where they are protected until they germinate. They also get the added bonus of growing in a medium made richer by the ant nest debris. From Wikipedia.

Begonia

No words needed.