Laughing Ravens

anemone blanda   I have planted these tiny corms in all the absolute wrong places. As with most bulbs, the grower is advised to plant them in full sun, in well drained soil and to avoid boggy, heavy clay. Yeah, not in the cards (or soil as the case may be). Some years, they come up where I didn't plant them. Wherever they finally find a place to call home, it is absolutely perfect. They came up last spring under one of the dwarf conifers beside the house. I never planted anything under there ... mostly because I cant get under there... simply not enough room for me to wiggle underneath. But whatever dug them up and helped plant them somewhere else seemed to have picked a great spot. Come late spring, these lovely dancing flowers find a way to catch every passing breeze no matter how slight. The color variety in anemone blanda is pretty straight forward. You can usually find a blueish shade, a pink, and a white. Supposedly, according to the catalogues, there is a true pink that is i...

Not sure if this was iris reticulata 'Harmony' or 'Pixie' iris reticulata 'Purple Hill' 'Blue Hill' among species crocus   Anything I could write about iris reticulata would pale in comparison to their awesome beauty. So instead, here are a few images from the past few years.   For such a tiny flower, they have the biggest punch! A few days ago, I wrote that early spring bulbs are the punk rockers of the spring garden. Art school dropouts with dyed hair, ready to get into a fight over who is hardier, in the middle of a snowstorm.   About twenty-ish years ago, we planted our first hundred iris reticulata, courtesy of Van Engelen . Talk about enabling! When you have a hundred of anything, you start thinking bigger. After you've planted a hundred bulbs, you ask yourself... what if I had four hundred more? What could I do with a huge wave of purple moving through the garden?   I should try to capture the wave of blue from atop a tall ladder or maybe...

When faced with the bleak dreary skies of January, it is easy to want to fast-forward into April when blooms start to appear in the garden again. Let me rephrase that. There are two faces of winter. One face is sun-shiny and snow blankets the countryside. The other gives you a side-eye, pelts you with ice pellets, and hides the sun behind thick, unmoving clouds for weeks. You'd never guess that I love winter.  The local expression for this kind of snow is "Ithacation." It consists primarily of sideways snow and ice that nearly always finds a way inside your collar and into your ears.  Every few years we are gifted with the Norman Rockwell "winters of year's past"... and the sky opens up, dumps feet of snow on us and then the sun comes out and everything is still for a brief moment.  So how is one to deal with the interminable time between the rich colors of fall and the ebullient outbursts of color in spring? Around here, that can extend from November well i...