The garden today

I can never remember what is supposed to bloom when, so here are some pictures of the garden today for reference next year.

This is a pieris japonica, or lily of the valley plant. It's the Scarlet O'Hara variety. All the red leaves are new growth. It's a slowgrowing evergreen that I planted at the northeast corner of the house. 

This is the whole front flower bed. The hyacinths are done (and I already cut off the stems) and the tulips are about half done. I cut about a dozen tulips for vases. The hydrangeas are leafing out pretty well. They are loaded with buds and I look forward to bloom time. I'll need to keep the dusty miller in check or it'll take over the whole yard.

This is half of the raised flower bed. The iris fronds are getting a little out of control, but now I can't tell which are old growth and which are new to cut them back. The lavender-and-white and the dark purple tulips seem to be the best varieties for self-multiplication. Most of the other types I will need to refresh in the fall. I stuck the dusty miller in there because I had extras, but the bed is getting pretty crowded. 

The iris fronds are pretty wild, but the stalks are starting to shoot up. Hopefully I'll be able to get another flower bed done soon so I can thin out these iris divisions.

And the stars of the show, the peonies. The middle one is white and is flanked by two pink Sarah Bernhardts. The white one comes up about a week earlier than the Sarah Bernhardts and has about a dozen buds on it. No buds yet on the SBs, but in another week they will.








I have dandelions all over the yard and spent a good deal of time weeding over the weekend. I broke my hand fork doing it. So I switched to my hand trowel. And that broke. Clearly the universe is telling me that I need the hand trowel that Victoria is giving away on her blog. (Or maybe that I'm weeding wrong? Or that I need to amend my soil?) Have you ever seen a nicer hand trowel? That's rhetorical. Of course you haven't.