Lycoris in bloom

Years ago a friend and fellow plant blogger gave me some Naked Lady/Resurrection Lily (Lycoris squamigera) bulbs.  I planted some in a pot and some others in the ground.  They grew well for me for years and for the first couple of years I expected to see some blooms, but they never came.

I'd nearly forgotten there were some planted in the ground until I walked around the side of the house last week and saw this:

Lycoris squamigera

I don't know what spurred the flowering this year.  It's been pretty hot and dry lately and I wouldn't have thought July would be the time of year for these to bloom.  After a bit of googling I learned that August to September is the typical bloom season, so I guess late July is not far from the norm.  I look forward to seeing these bloom each year now.  Hopefully this was the first of many.

Modifying the Tulip display

We have had a rather stunning Tulip display in the front yard for about 6 years now.  I started by planting red and white tulips staggered in concentric circles in the figure 8 garden.  Those individual bulbs have multiplied quite a bit over the years.

This Fall we decided to add to the display, without removing any of the current bulbs.  Red and yellow Tulips are easy to come by and are a common color scheme.  I was adamant that we didn't do something common.  We looked into different colors that we could add to our red and white to make a nice theme.  We decided to add a couple of pinks and purples to the mix.  It will be a sort of Valentine's mix of colors.

New tulip colors being added for next spring.

We are adding about 60 bulbs this year - 15 Apricot Impressions, 15 Purple Flag, 15 Pink Impressions and 12-15 Lilac bulbs that my in-laws bought in the Netherlands.

I'm excited to see how these bulbs complement our Spring display next year.  We were also careful to pick Tulip styles that match our existing contingent of Darwin hybrids.  The added bulbs didn't have to be Darwins, but we didn't want to add a bunch of different heights and frilly shapes to our existing display.

Bulbs laid out carefully between the circles of existing bulbs and ready to plant.

Future modifications will probably mean that we'll have to dig up bulbs and replace them with different colors.  The other option would be to have an "anything goes" bed of Tulips, but for now we're going for more of a planned look and I think it has been working really well.  We've even had a couple of neighbors ask if they could use our Tulip bed for photo shoots with their kids.  We were happy to oblige!  That's what it's all about - having others enjoy our Tulip bed.

spring blooms

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a project at work that had me computing the angle of the sun above the horizon across the US at all times of the day. Apparently the companies that take the high resolution overhead photographs for Google Earth and other mapping utilities require that the sun be at least 30 degrees above the horizon. When I started the project, about half of the US had a solar angle lower than 30 degrees all day long. Now the entire US reaches a solar angle greater than 30 degrees each day.

Kingdom Plantae has noticed! Here are some pictures of the bloomage occurring in my house and yard.

Several flowers I didn't get to until they had already wilted - including our crocuses.  I forgot to get a picture of our Flowering Quince bush when it was all blooms and no leaves, but here's what it looks like today:



Our Tulip tree (saucer magnolia) is starting to get big.  Since it has a lot of branching at ground level, I have been trying to thin it out a little each year so that it will be somewhat tree-like.  I think it is coming along pretty well.  I will probably have to remove a couple more branches this year.  Here's the gorgeous blooms:



We have 3 different color combinations of Daffodils in our back flower garden (all yellow, light yellow with dark yellow center, and white with orange tinted center).  Here's two of them:



We planted a flowering cherry tree 2 years ago and within a couple of months we noticed something horribly wrong with it.  Even though it was really just a 6 foot tall twig, it appeared to have been struck by lightning or diseased or something.  Half of it had turned black and ceased growing.  There is a clear line running straight down it's skinny trunk.  All new growth has come from the other half.  We've been debating whether to dig it up and move it to a less prominent location, since we had strategically positioned it to overhang our corner garden.  But this year it surprised us.  It has its first ever cheery blossom coming out and they look to be ready to open very soon!  Can you see them in the foreground?:



I received this flowering peach tree last year as a gift and it was covered in 2 colors of blooms when we planted it.  I'm glad to see it burst forth color again this year.  It has both magenta and light pink blooms intermixed on all the branches:



I overwintered 4 cyclamen indoors that had been very healthy all year outdoors.  They lost most of their leaves and went dormant during the winter, so I don't know how they will do with the transition.  Here is a new cyclamen that I just planted.  It also has 2 colors blooms:



These are the amaryllis that I wrote about in my previous post.  I have had them for several years now and they rebloomed for me this year.



I also wrote in my last post about getting my Christmas cactus to rebloom.  Well, I have a friend that just moved to Ireland for a couple of years and left her plants behind with me while she's gone.  Her Christmas (Easter?) cactus didn't bloom at the same time as mine did, but just surprised me with some blooms in the last couple of weeks:



This one's not really a bloom, but I was very happy to see this new little guy's foliage coming out this year.  I just planted this Japanese Maple tree last year and I wasn't sure that he was going to make it.



The tulips we planted in the backyard have bloomed a couple of weeks sooner each year than those in the front yard.  I will have to post again when our tulip-filled front flower bed is in bloom.  Here is the first of our backyard tulips:



We bought another azalea this year.  The price was irresistible ($2.48)!  Hopefully the ones we planted last year will bloom again for us.  They might need some fertilizer encouragement.  Here's our new one:



I was suprised to see these tiny blooms on my little leopard lily (an indoor plant).  The blooms actually have little purple stamens coming out of the white flowers.  I couldn't pick up the detail with my camera though.



I will post more blooms as they arrive.  I expect to have a BUNCH of tulips, some daylilies, irises and who knows what else!