Spring flowers

The best thing about spring- better than the warming weather, the cherry blossoms, the daffodils, and new leaves- is forsythia.


I love forsythia as much as ever, and, like last year, I've gone about my city stealing a branch here and branch there to brighten up my house. Luke says he's sad when forsythia season is over and I stop pointing out every one we see as we drive down the road (and I choose to believe he's not being sarcastic).

But because all those other things about spring (the warming weather, the cherry blossoms, the daffodils, and the new leaves) are nice, too, I don't discriminate and collect pretty things for every room.

In the kitchen: a big, gaudy vase full of forsythia that's as wide as my whole table.

In the living room: a much more demure bouquet of daffodils.

And for the bathroom: Grape Hyacinth/Muscari

One thing that's nice about living in the same area for a while is that I remember where I collected flowers last year and the year before. I was especially glad to remember this one, a variety of double daffodil (I can't figure out which) that I have only seen at a law office near the city library. I think it's just the prettiest:

Spring Flowers

Spring is really here now. It's been raining a lot more than it usually does for Utah springs (it seems like there's not much of a transition between winter and summer here). I've started feeding birds every day, and I like hearing them outside my window every morning. My flower bed is starting to fill in, too. I've got grape hyacinth, tulips, and pink hyacinth in a color I'd never seen before- it's not the normal pastel pink, but almost magenta.

This week I planted irises and day lillies in a bed in the side of the yard. It took an hour and a half to clear all the old leaves and wandering grass from a 3 x 6 foot area, and I got a sunburn, but it looks really nice. Only twelve more feet to go...

Got a good compost pile started about a month ago, and it's already looking really good. I threw in the old sawdust log from the shiitake mushrooms, and I'm hoping that there's some leftover mycelium that will help everything decompose.

As for the rest of my gardening: a lot will be planted when it stops raining long enough for us to get outside and plant. We have swiss chard, peas, sweet peas, and lettuce (we're going to try from seeds because the starts we planted last weekend didn't seem to take the transplant well). I've also started a bunch indoors so they'll be ready to go outside at the end of may, when we're sure to have warm enough nights. We're looking forward to yellow squash, zucchini, eggplant, chives, thai and sweet basil, and a dozen or more kinds of flowers.

Forsythia

My mom and I used to drive around our local neighborhoods at the beginning of spring, looking for forsythia. She would get upset when people would trim the bushes down into neat little hedges because, "They're supposed to be free and wild!" This year, my husband and I went out walking with our clippers for some late-night forsythia-stealing. One branch from the neighbors across the street, two from down the street, and pretty soon we had a nice bouquet to put in our bedroom.
This week I embroidered this little forsythia bush on white cotton knit (which was a nice material to work with). I haven't decided what to use it for yet, probably a little clutch wallet or pencil case.

Hints of a pending spring

I like how even my indoor plants know that spring is coming. As soon as the days started getting longer, they started putting out new leaves and shoots. I like having new growth in the house that I can monitor daily.

Leaves unfolding:




This little baby is going to grow up to be a gerbera daisy:


My favorite, though, are the plants that put up their leaves, which slowly unroll for over the next week or so: