Best Mother's Day Bouquet Ever!

It came in the mail . Email, that is. My youngest, the one who bought my house from me and lets Steve and me live there in the summers, sent it. It came in the form of three photos. It's "our" yard, the the one we together spent years in, planting a huge variety of bulbs, mostly daffodils but also crocus and scilla, scattering the divisions into new locations, adding new varieties, scattering violet seeds from what started as a literal handful of plants from the previous place, over so many years and so widely that for a couple of weeks nearly the entire lawn is purple. After around 10 days the purple lawn becomes purple-and-yellow as the dandelions start to take over. It's a byproduct of delaying mowing long enough for the violets to scatter their new crop of seeds. And truly, we never mind the dandelions. The neighbors do, but we don't care about that either.

In all those long springs, meaning up until that first delayed mowing, crocus bloom in various colors, a few snowdrops still struggle through, some very determined tulips still manage to emerge, lilies of the valley perfume the neighborhood, and the summer flowers show their green beginnings. I'm sure other flowers pop up in there too, but it's been so long since I was up there before June I'm sure I've forgotten them. I do miss their parade of colors.

Last summer, if you've followed this, you know I did a large amount of yard work, eliminating weed vines, weed trees, weed bushes, weed flowers, weed ferns (they'll be back), dead cranberry bushes, all the dead parts of a barely surving dogwood, weed thistles, paring back the lily of the valley, cleaning up a daylily patch which had become full of dropped birch branches along with vines intruding, pulling baby junipers out of the lawn proper. There was a lot more of course, including even planting some new varieties of daylily, hoping to find some which duplicated a particular shade of purple I'd just discovered they now come in. It seems endless to write of it, but each morning for an hour or two I was happily outside, in a labor of love restoring beauty to the yard, as well as a celebration of my health and growing ability to move, well balanced and sure footed, growing in stamina. 

If the pictures he sent are representative of the rest of the yard, my labors paid off. Big time. Note that I fully expect to repeat my endeavors this summer, or the "jungle" will takeover again. Some spots were starting to even as I was finishing up my summer.

The first photo is a of lone daffodil, two shades of yellow, darker in the trumpet, emerging from a solid patch of green and blue. My first thought was violets, but a closer look showed scillas, solidly filled in around it. Oh, I should have remembered their timing better: of course not the violets yet.

The next shot is along the south side of the house, where blueberries were planted, with daffodils in front. Grass invaded almost as soon as everything went in, but the daffodils are now thick enough through there that grass is almost gone. Other weeds will fill in again but for now it's all daffodils. The early ones are white, fairly flat blossoms with flat yellow trumpets, as well as more of the two-tone yellow ones. Later ones in this patch as well as in borders around many more planting rows and all through the front garden will be all sorts of colors and shapes, even doubles. One can see greens, oranges, yellows, whites, and apricots when those bloom. But now is just the early ones. This warmest, most protected row blooms first.

The third shot has no daffodils, but is a wide shot along the south border of the front yard. One can see the bare trunks of very mature lilacs at ground level. Late in the month these will explode with the 8 or 9 colors we planted them in, though it will be tempered more than a bit by their having been pruned down to six feet last spring, their first major pruning since being planted. If not this year then next year should bring a stunning display. Since this shot angles back to the back yard fence, a couple of those bare trunks belong to pink flowering honeysuckle bushes. Turning the corner at the fence, crossing past the fence gate it also shows the surviving cranberries. Hostas will come up along the entire area except the gate with it's volume of traffic, separating plantings from lawn, showing a late summer sprinkling of lavender blooms along their route.

The bare trunks aren't the focus of this photo, however, just its framing. Covering the ground for about 4 to 8 feet coming into the yard from those trunks is a solid, if irregular, patch of blue scillas. Thirty years work and maybe a dozen bulbs can work wonders!

It's not just the flowers, it's the years of memories, the work side-by-side, their sturdy endurance, and memories of the promises to come as seasons change, all coming together in these shots, which make these my best Mother's Day bouquet ever!