April 2006

The Trilliums we planted last year are coming along fine for the most part. A few small ones were potted up last year, but thus far only one of those has come up again. The ones in the ground have fared much better, as is evident by this picture.

A flat with potted-up Scilla starting to flower just in time for the plant/garage sale this coming weekend.

The garage sale has come and gone and despite being early in the season we sold a fair number of plants. Yet, there was plenty of material that simply did not show anywhere near potential and few of those went. At the last minute Waita decided to put up some Licorice Fern -it's native here, and an evergreen fern- and we darn near sold out of them. We could have done with some more Bleeding Heart, the Scilla did very well as did our Asiatic lily 'Orange Beauty', which is a good thing because we STILL have plenty of them, and I must admit that in spite of the variety offered, few Hostas went. But then, on most of those the leaves had just barely started to unfurl. The real surprise were the potted Daffodils, most were in full bloom and they sold surprisingly well.

The Easter weekend did not lend itself for another plant sale, it was raining, cold and blustery at times, and on top of that Peter had a flu breaking so he wasn't keen on spending much time out of doors period. In a lot of respects it's just as well we didn't have one, most of the plants had not put on significantly more size, so, it's keeping our fingers crossed for the 22nd/23rd weekend for which the weather prognostications have been favourable thus far.

We're now almost 3 weeks further with this Trillium bloom than we were with the ones you see at the top of the page. Two things are apparent in this close-up: the colour is gradually changing and a seed pod is developing. Can't recall how big the seed pods were last year, but we have seen no evidence in any of three spots we have planted them that they have self-seeded.

What is sprouting for us this year are Hosta seeds! You may recall me mentioning earlier that we seeded about 6 different Hosta seeds, some from a most generous couple in Virginia as well as some of our own. They were somewhat slow in germinating but I'm starting to see more and more popping up in the seed trays. FWIW, these are from seeds of Hosta 'Xanadu Empress Wu', which grows rather big apparently.

We have 4 different varieties of Bleeding Heart around the yard. This one is a cultivar called 'Luxuriant', apparently a hybrid of formosa and eximia. Because it isn't as spectacular as spectabilis it doesn't get the attention it does, but we like it for it's much more controlled growth, spectabilis can become quite floppy and consume a huge amount of space. Our native bleeding heart, formosa, has been difficult to get going in our yard and only now are we seeing any sign of it coming back again, but just barely, it's a puny little thing and I'll be happy to get it growing some this year with a bit of TLC.

April is great month for increasing colour contrast amongst the various flowering bulbs, in this case between some Daffodils and some Scilla.