weekly bloom: the start

The  hellebores came back! They are a little bit more scraggly, a little less well-formed than when I bought them last year; I have left them entirely alone to get established. It seems to have worked. I believe the cultivar is "Ivory Prince," which is one of the commercial hybrids that has upturned, rather than the usual downturned, flowers. (I know: the traditional hellebores are lovely, and getting "Ivory Prince" is sort of akin to getting those black violas, or things-that-look-like-other-things — of course you can do it, but why? But hellebores are so beautiful that I do want to see them, and I am not really a foliage kind of girl.)

The mid-spring tulips have also sprung. These are 'Banja Luka.' This photograph doesn't quite capture their lurid garishness in full sun (they look quite reasonabl here, in fact), but trust me: they are the plastic flowers of the tulip world. The Spanish Inquisition loves to look at them.



I finally laid the path down in the garden weekend before last. The previous owner had had the pavers down, but after I moved almost all of her plants (she had had a thing for shrubbery and 'Roxann' geraniums; I don't, particularly the geraniums), it didn't make any sense. We did want a bit of a path, though, to give the garden a bit of contrast, so I made a winding sort of path that also gave me some natural boundaries to work with.

I made the plan last year, and tried to execute it — but the first round of flanking plants perished the the Great July Die-Off of 2012, and the wooden stakes I had used to mark the tulips' locations disintegrated, so some plants are little closer to the path than I would like. It's a bit raw right now, but after some rain and some growth I'm sure it will be just fine.

The garden two weekends ago:


And the garden yesterday:


You can see that the heat wave we've been having has done wonders for the growth. The mid-spring tulips are blooming now (see above), the chives have gone haywire, as they are wont to do, and the roses and peonies have started leafing out. I may put mulch down soon, around the roses and perhaps the path. I was going to leave everything else — there's periwinkle groundcover by the lavender and patches of violets — and let it all grow in, naturally, but last year taught me that that is just an open invitation to weeds. I'm still mulling it over.

I also pruned the roses in the back garden this weekend, but no photographs of that: that place looks like a wind storm swept through. I only had an hour or so, so I didn't do much, just the pruning, by which I mean I took down seven- and eight-foot long canes. (In some cases, I even yanked them out of the grass, where they had tried to root.)

I'm starting to think that those scabrosas might be climbers.