Picture post the second: May

So here's the tulips starting to get going in the front...

Missed out on a picture of the early ones this year. Pattern seems to remain early reds and pinks and purples moving to later white and black-purple.

 View going into the backyard.  Some minor tidying to do, but: SQUEE.

Overall in the backyard, featuring swank copper fountain and awesome tulips!

Shade bed (need to move/disguise the extension cord currently powering the fountain):

 Tulips!  Gypsophila appears to be another random winter casualty.  Will have to find something else to replace it.

Wall bed. This is not the spot I had in mind for the fountain, but it really works well there, as it turns out. Just need to bend over it to spy for lily beetles.

 My god, this thing is gorgeous. Seriously worth every penny. We've been running it constantly; with the windows open, you can still hear it.

Those heucheras are solid gold in the east bed. Really rounds out the colour palette.

 Dwarf korean fir.  Could not resist this texture. Have put it in the shade bed next to the maidenhair fern.

Aaaaaaaaand another week later. Amazing how much things fill in given a cool, rainy week.

 Again with the heucheras.  Damn.  Might need to look for a few more of these.

Rampaging bittersweet vine and increasingly dilapidated shed. I kind of enjoy the wild-and-woolly look of the vine, actually, and the birds love it, but it desperately needs a haircut.

Picture post the first: end of April/early May

I was a little worried about the magnolia given all the freeze-thaw fakeouts we got before spring finally decided to arrive, but as it turned out it bloomed spectacularly this year.  Behold:

Full landscape, for the record.  Should totally have gotten a picture of the crocuses that bloomed a week or two earlier, but I don't think a picture really does justice to how uplifting they were anyway.

Wow, blogging fail for me this spring.  In addition to it being effing cold and miserable out well into April, other projects and preoccupations kind of took over.  Highlights in this post, to be followed by a few picture posts.

* One lesson learned: the seeds really do need to be somewhere that jumps to my attention in my daily routine, because after a promising start in the downstairs storage closet with a timer on the lights, I forgot all about them and they dried out and died.  ARGH.

* Plant sale was glorious as ever. Mostly bought irises, since looking at pictures of the yellow one in the front bed all winter convinced me that I need many more of them. Also picked up some stinking hellebores - they don't really stink, god knows why they called them that - since I have been eyeing their lovely foliage for ever; some white-flowering opuntias; and a dwarf korean fir. Got my mother-in-law a moon frost hemlock and now I want one too. Am getting to be a real sucker for dwarf evergreens.

* Insect plagues seem somewhat reduced from last year - there's the silver lining for a chilly spring, I guess. Knock on wood, anyway. Roses may have been badly compromised, though; fucking sawflies, or whatever the hell those things were that I found on EVERY SINGLE BUD in the front yard.

* Apparent casualties of the winter, bizarrely enough: kerria, backyard euonymus, and artemisia powis castle. My Monet weigela is also looking pretty straggly.

* Not just one but TWO flower stalks on the go on every eremurus except the really big one. OH HELL YEAH. I was afraid they were in some sort of snit over the soil conditions, but I guess they just needed a couple of seasons to get established.

* Didn't plant any new tulips last fall, but as it turned out they almost all came back anyway.  Must get some of the interesting-shaped ones my mother-in-law has, too; was not too fussed about them based on the picture, but seeing them in person has convinced me.