White Flowers

There are a variety of white flowers,
all blooming at the same time, now!

Sweet woodruff is still blooming.
This groundcover at its peak.
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Dutch Iris in above photo,
also, comes in yellow and purple.
Below are ‘bearded’ iris,
which come in a rainbow of solid
or 2- or 3-color blossoms.
Both types of iris seem to be deer-resistant.
Very few plants are truly deer-proof.
When deer get hungry enough,
they eat almost any plant.
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This is the first year my snowball bush has flowered.
I wanted one of these beautiful plants for so long!
The blossoms started out green
before slowly turning white.
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A couple of last tulips.
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First Calla lily bloom.
The plant struggled this year,
as the mild winter gave rise to early leafing out.
Then a later snow
knocked the new growth back to nothing.
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Lilacs and strawberries have both
been blooming for awhile.
The lilacs are fading,
but strawberries will go longer.
Cultivated ever-bearing strawberries bloom until frost.

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Springing Fast

The rain stopped and the sun came out.
Many flowers are going through their short lives quickly.

Camellia blossoms are always beautiful,
but short-lived.
It is a good thing the glossy leaves stay green all year.
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This azalea bush will be covered in red
at peak bloom.
The deck is scheduled to be repaired this summer,
I am afraid I will have to prune this plant severely:(
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Reliably, this is the first rhododendron
to flower every year.
When I took this photo yesterday morning,
there was only one other open bud.
This afternoon, half the plant was abloom.
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Blue Bells, Cockle Shells . . .
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Bleeding heart is a newer addition to my garden.
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Sweet woodruff is one of my favorite groundcovers.
Besides the delicate flowers, the leaves are evergreen.

A Proliferation of Purple and Pink

Lamb’s Ear makes a lovely ground cover and cut flower.
It can be invasive, which I control with minimal watering.
Another perk of this plant is that deer ignore it.
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Lavender looks so pretty when in bloom!
I fell in love with the view of a hillside of lavender and have been slowly moving seedlings (if you don’t deadhead lavender, it loves to go to seed) into a pattern on the downhill side of my house.
This has turned into a slow project, but one I have had fun pursuing.
* * * * *

This perennial geranium is a cranesbill.  Such a funny name.
It too will reseed, and I cannot imagine deadheading these small flowers.
The baby plants are easy to discard, if you don’t want to share them with other gardeners.
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These sage flowers were tricky to photograph.  I finally discovered the perfect background was right in front of me.
This is a yearling plant that I purchased when I noticed the original was looking a little feeble.  Sure enough, this spring, only one came back to life.
* * * * *

When I started flower gardening, I planted many garlic cloves in an effort to deter deer from nibbling my greenery.
Now that fences (flower jails :-))have been erected around vulnerable plantings, the garlic is not so needed.
But, they are rather pretty at this stage of life.

Pink Creeping Phlox

Just a small pot started this ground cover of phlox many years ago.  Without any care, it has spread down a small hill.  It is easy to forget until spring when many small pink flowers bloom.  Deer and other animals ignore its presence.  It gets walked on and treated shabbily, but keeps coming back.

Violets are Coming on Strong

From a shovel-full many years ago, this ground cover of violets grows prolifically in my yard.  It loves any shade it can find, and thrives under a deck or under rhododendrons.  If I am digging plants or bulbs surrounded by violets, the violets are the first to come back.  The blooms will continue into summer if they get enough moisture.

Bloomin’ Violets

I believe these flowers were waiting for rain and cool to start blooming.  Violets must be very “tough cookies” to put out their flowers in the cool of winter.  Much as I’ve tried to vase these blossoms, they just do not seem to like to live indoors.  It must be too warm for them.

Even if it snows, these tiny flowers will bounce back as soon as the sun melts an opening in the ground.  We should be enjoying violets until the heat of summer sends them dormant until the next rainy season.

This fall, I have been moving around many plants, some of them surrounded by this ground cover.  The little violet rootlets just get pushed back underground, and as long as it keeps on raining, they will reestablish in a new home.

Moving Day for Foxglove, Lamb’s Ear & Lavender

Today was a sunny fall day, the ground has been thoroughly moistened by rain, but it is still firm to walk on.  A perfect day for transplanting.

First off, I moved some Lambs Ear a great, drought-resistant ground cover.   Next, I put some Lavender plants in to complete a row along side the driveway.  In the lower right of the first photo, you can see a slim transplanted Lavender.  This particular bed now has Lavender, then Lambs Ear, then Shasta Daisies, and on the outside are Irises.  All of these plants are deer-resistant, thus there is no fence around them.  An Oregon Grape shrub (not pictured) in the middle, is deer fenced, even though it is supposedly deer-resistant.  My plan is to keep the Oregon Grape fenced until it is tall enough to withstand the deer nibbling.

Now to the Foxglove.  There was one plant within the deer fence and on irrigation.  It put out an enormous amount of babies.  I counted planting 76 of them.  While I dug the Foxglove from within the deer fenced flower bed, I also dug up a number of Asters that had grown up in places I did not want them.  Many of the rooted Aster starts are now in small pots to give away, but I cannot begin to keep up with them.  The Foxglove was planted along the outside of a fenced flower bed.  The second photo shows a few Foxgloves (I count eight) as they were planted.  There are at least five plantings similar to this, besides other individual plantings. They should look very nice from the front deck by next summer.  I am now learning to keep my flowers deadheaded to prevent an over abundance of progeny.  Should I call it birth-control for perennials?