Blooms Have Been Spotted

News flash! We have blooms. The winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) above were seen in the gazebo garden and hosta hollow garden. We probably have 200 or so blooming but have thousands getting ready to go with this deceptive weather. It's so nice when these pop up although they may be in for a shock in the coming weeks when the weather gets back to "normal". This is the earliest I've seen these blooming at the gardens but the color is welcome. We usually see them peaking around the first week of April. To the left is a snowdrop (Galanthus sp.) in bloom in the gazebo garden as well. Despite that garden being semi-shade in summer, the winter sun gets in nicely around the hackberries (Celtis occidentalis) and we will usually see our first bulbs in the garden in this space. See further down for a nice representation of how snowdrops got their name. These are just peeking out in the hosta hollow (look at the center of the image).

Great crew today with Marianne working on fern labels and both Dr. Gredler and Rose painting our various garden structures. Urban was here as well and we had Larry, Bill and Little Jerry out in the garden picking up lights, debris and accomplishing general clean-up. With the warmer weather, we like to tidy up around the gardens as we're likely to have visitors and I think we all agree that the garden can look a bit sloppy after a tough winter. We're actually out there cutting back ornamental grasses as well. Normally we would wait until late March but there isn't much winter interest to the grasses that were mashed and leveled back in December with that wet, heavy snow. With so many bulbs popping up early, we're trying to avoid stepping on anything as we tidy the beds and get ready for an early spring? We'll see how it goes! Vern, Dave and Dick H. were all here for extra credit and worked on the arches and other projects. We had our Garden Development Committee meeting (Dr. Gredler, Dave, Maury, Carrie, Joanne, Chris, Big John, Iza, Hal and Gary) too and talked about our future projects, enhancements and directives. We also saw Peg, Luke and Maury here.