Yesterday, as we were trying to leave to take our cat, Abby, to the vet, our progress was impeded by a 3 foot (+-) black snake. My husband tried to nudge it on its way, but finally picked it up and tossed it out into the back yard. (One sign of spring I’m not particularly fond of.)
Our tulip tree, If you look carefully at the bottom center of this pic, you’ll see the recovering Amber keeping me company as I took pics this morning.
Redbud and forsythia
It really helps my mood to be able to invite Amber to join me and to walk around the yard a bit, seeing things coming to life, or in full celebration of the joy of the weather.
My spirits have lifted. I don’t care that it’s rainy and cold, knowing that spring isn’t too far off. I’m hoping that we’ve broken the back of winter, but I know that Mother Nature can change her mind and sprinkle (or slam) us with more of the white stuff this month. I’m trying to keep positive thoughts about all of it, seeing lots of blooms around the yard – more each day.
This morning, for example, I noticed that several of our redbud trees are blooming.
A quick walk around the yard – it IS still raining a bit – shows lots of color. Here’s a forsythia.
The tulip tree didn’t lose all of its blooms.
And daffodils are showing their happy faces all around the yard.
My heart is full as I see all these sweet things blooming their little hearts out. I hope that you are seeing signs of promise and hope, too.
I spend much of my time hacking things down. Our property is about 8 acres of scrubby ‘woods’ on top of a ridge line outside of town. Unless we keep at it, I think the weeds and trees would grow up over the house, yard, shop, and driveway, swallowing all we’ve done over the more than 35 years we have lived here.
This is a longitudinal view of our trio of brick planters that run between our front yard and the top of our driveway. The huge green plant is the end of the wisteria that my husband has trained to grow all the way across the ‘corner’ formed by this plant and one of our fireplace wood holders. As you can see, the plant is like a weed, taking over all we will allow for it to consume, kind of like mint in an herb garden. At this point, it’s hard to see there is a trio of planters!
Here’s another view of the same huge green wisteria plant, this photo taken on the yard side of the planters. Actually, there is wisteria and then forsythia in combination.
This shows there actually ARE planters there – just completely over-grown now.
You can see that it would be very difficult to ride a mower anywhere close to the edges of the planters. I’ll start my work on these today, hopefully. This will be a multi-day project.
Our clematis came into bloom the last couple of days. They are right behind a long brick planter where I’m growing tomatoes. It makes a pretty picture when you go out to the side yard and suddenly see all this purple. A spirit-lifter for sure. :0)
We’re going to have a nice display of twice-blooming deep purple iris soon. As you can see, I need to clean up this planter a lot. I’ll try to thin these out, moving them elsewhere around the yard.The wisteria is looking better each day. There is a small redbud tree behind the wisteria, plus a forsythia blooming behind it, too. A display like this really brings up my spirits!
It’s cool here (45 degrees F. and a pretty good breeze), but I needed some spirit-lifting and took my camera outside to walk around and see what I could see.
tulip treetulip tree blossom closeupjust one of the groups of daffodilsRedbud starting to bloomForsythia starting to bloomWisteria budsHarder to be down when Mother Nature is starting to put on her annual show! :0)
“Be like the flower, turn your face to the sun.” — Kahlil Gibran
Daffodils and Tulip TreeForsythiaRed Bud TreeAnother Red Bud Tree
We actually have 7 Red Bud Trees blooming right now. Iris greenery is spearing out of the ground and in some of the planters around the yard. Today the sun is shining and the high is supposed to get to 70!
Much of the rest of the week will be rainy, bringing life to more and more.
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