Narcissus

The garden rule I broke today is: Don't plant flowers in a straight line. And I did it for a very good reason: I wanted a straight line. I've looked at the scene above for many years, and frequently thought to myself how much better it would be to have that swath of daffodils swing [...]

It always seems like there is nothing blooming in mid-May, but when I really look around, I realize there is a lot blooming but none of it is flashy, like the big yellow sheets of daffodils previous or the three Grandes Dames of June that will soon be here. The blooms of mid-May are modest [...]

I took a look at last year's April bloom day post, and discovered that most of last year's blooms are already gone. The crocus that were in their glory last April, are completely done with this year. The squills are at the end of their bloom. The Cornelian cherry that was merely in bud this [...]

The bulbs that I am forcing have started to bloom. I put one hyacinth in a forcing glass into the basement on November 29th. I potted the rest up on December 5th. I brought them all up when I saw green tips emerging from the bulbs. I now realize this was too early. According to [...]

Mr. McGregor's Daughter, in an effort to promote domestic harmony*, has requested gardeners everywhere to tally up the number of plants they currently have growing inside. Here are my results: Outdoor Plants Wintering Over 1 rosemary 1 'Rehoku Sunrise' carex (an experiment) 1 apple seedling (my middle daughter's experiment) 1 orange tree grown from seed [...]

High of 88F, a record, perhaps. Can daffodils suffer heat stroke? Some of mine fell over. I took a look at them shortly before nine in the morning, and they were lovely as only a freshly opened daffodil can be. By the time I got home late afternoon, some were already past their prime, and [...]

Looking over last year's April Bloom Day post, I see the same things blooming at pretty much the same time. The smaller-and-earlier species crocus are on the wane, but the later-and-larger Dutch crocus are definitely making a color statement. I'm thinking about getting more of these and extending the crocus bank further towards the road [...]

I suppose there exists, somewhere on this planet, an ornamental gardener who has never grown a plant that they had been given from someone else's garden, but it is hard for me to imagine it. Before I even knew myself to be a gardener, when I was just a kid, I tagged along behind the [...]

This looked spectacular earlier in May, but the narcissus were already done by the time Gardeners Bloom Day came around. Those orange-cup daffodils were blooming at my neighbor's, between her house and the brook, but too far away from the house to be noticed. I marked them and dug them up and got half for [...]