Couldn't Every Day Be Like This?

Today was really the perfect day in terms of sunshine and temperature. It was a little warmer than I like to see but no one was complaining out in the gardens, including the increasing number of visitors that are strolling around the paths. The gardens are extremely colorful right now with daffodils just past peak but early tulips overlapping nicely. In fact, our tulips, timed for early May, in front of the Parker Education Center have started blooming. The Juno iris (Iris bucharica) above is looking good and is one that we plant in fall. This hardy plant will go dormant by mid-summer and does surprisingly well in part shade and in tougher soils. The specimen above is probably five years old or so. We had a good crew today with Larry pumping out water features for cleaning, John working on composting and hole digging (see below to the right) and Marv and Terry putting up more obelisks, pvc planters and bouncing between rototilling, mowing and mulching. Note how John looks like a "natural" leaning on that shovel. The image to the left catches our neat sign logo with rockcress (Arabis caucasica 'Snowcap') in full bloom underneath.

Mel and June (new gardening volunteers) worked down in the sunken garden and attacked the first batch of weeds in their assigned garden area. We rely on 100s of garden volunteers but do have about 30 that take care of their own assigned garden area. I would like to increase this number in the coming years. While I did some herbicide spraying and odds and ends, Marianne and Kay were the dynamic duo (see below) and made quite a bit of progress tidying up the iris beds near the arboretum. Urban and Rose finished painting the antique light poles in the main parking lot and Rose worked on some other painting projects. We also saw Maury, Roger, Julie, Dave and Paul over here today. Lots of progress on a perfect day. More enjoyable blooms below with prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) in bloom in our alpine garden. This is typically an early May bloomer but is of course very early. I like the wispy seed heads (picture forthcoming) that will form over the next six weeks or so on prairie smoke (giving this plant its coming name). The bottom picture is of 'Leonard Messel' magnolia (Magnolia x loebneri) in bloom (just past peak) north of our sunken garden. The light frosts last week did affect the magnolias but this one is still looking pretty good.