State of the Garden

So it turns out that the answer to the question I posed a couple of weeks ago--the one where I wondered which spring bulbs were starting to emerge in my yard--was not what I thought it would be. The winner, in fact, goes to snow crocuses! And here they are in their teeny tiny but oh-so-elegant and stunningly colorful glory. These little guys, it seems, are at the front lines of the entire spring bulb family, the first to bravely emerge from the ground, keeping their fingers crossed that the weather is warm enough for their pretty petals to survive. While I haven't done any serious research, I'm gonna go ahead and guess that they get their name from the fact that they can emerge from the ground even right after a snowfall. Which is precisely what they did.

In keeping with the theme of refusing to do research, Robb and I also realized how astonishingly daft we were to not have read the package closely when we planted the snow crocuses in the ground. We planted the bulbs in cute little designs, winding around trees and alongside paths, but failed to realize that snow crocuses should actually be planted together in groups. I'm talking like 16 bulbs per square foot. Instead, we placed them about 1 bulb per 2 square feet. Consequently, we have some very lovely and very spread out 3-inch-tall flowers. Stunning up close! Probably would have had a little more impact as a group. Ah...learning lessons in the garden. So fun.

In other news, we got to spend a little time in the garden with friends this weekend. Megan is staying with us all week from San Francisco, and we made a lovely taco brunch on Saturday. (Note: taco brunch doesn't mean Mexican-style huevos and chilaquiles. It literally means eating tacos for brunch. Delicious!) Julie dropped by with a bottle of bubbly and grapefruit juice. We sat outside, admiring our tiny flowers and soaking up the sunshine while Robb trounced around with his clippers and shovel, getting all of the yard mess in working order. At one point he stumbled upon this budding hydrangea which had somehow separated from its mother plant. He scooped it up and put it in a pot, which we then placed at the center of our circle of plastic Adirondak chairs--right where the sun could hit the plant squarely. I'm not a professional botanist (as you may have figured out), but I'm hoping that hydrangeas also benefit from things like lots of attention, oldies being played on the radio, and hilarious stories, because it sure got a lot of all of those things sitting in the middle of our circle that day. (Here's a little close up of the tiny hydrangea, in case you'd like a peek.)