Early Spring
31 Jan 2013
My entire yard is covered in flowers. Everything has decided it’s spring. Azaleas laugh at our silly calendars.
I fear for the fruit trees especially, that their brazen and daring natures are going to ultimately hurt them when we get that inevitable late-season freeze. Losing fruit to a freeze might be preferable to me having to remove it later- I want deep strong roots more than I want fruit for these trees for a couple of years.
The camellias seem to laugh at me. The buds are fat and potential for weeks, months… then the flowers open, turn brown, and drop to the ground in a few short days. I’ve never cared for camellias before. I never thought much of flowers in general, to be honest, at least not flowers that don’t have a scent, don’t attract pollinators, and don’t turn into food. I don’t know if it’s the heritage nature of these plants or their sheer gorgeousness, but they’ve totally won me over. It helped when I found that at least one camellia tree’s deep flowers are incubating or housing green lacewings- I snipped some flowers to bring in the house and at least a dozen lacewings crawled out of the blossoms and flew away.
The same can not be said of the loropetalum. I have a lot of loropetalum in the back yard and it’s all in crazy bloom right now… which looks to me like muppet hair. Or like the trees are festooned with hot pink confetti. For a plant with such enthusiastic blossoms, it is curiously sterile. Nothing eats it. The blooms have no scent and attract no butterflies, bugs, or birds. The loropetalums are also crowding out the citrus trees, which means unless I can find some redeeming factor, the loropetalums are outta here.
What’s blooming in your yard right now?
June 18, 2013 at 1:42 pm 
June 18, 2013 at 12:32 pm 
Jan 31, 2013 @ 20:02:40
Beautiful!
I have nothing, NOTHING blooming right now – an extremely dry and warm winter interspersed with occasional blizzards means everything that doesn’t dessicate is shocked or frozen. (Today was fifty and clear again after two days of snow – lovely, until you look at the ground.) I’m hoping that the snowdrops I put in last year will start coming up soon, though.
I’m also having a really lousy time with houseplants; the only thing that’s really thriving is the spiderplant in the bathroom. It’s a little demoralizing. Thanks for the vicarious delight!
Feb 04, 2013 @ 10:15:57
Is that part of the drought cycle?
Feb 04, 2013 @ 15:18:37
That’s a question! We know that 2012 was a historically dry year in the West in general (and my area was in an “extreme drought” designated zone until mid-October), and our 2012-2013 winter precip so far is very low, but there have been years when we were at 10-20% snowpack in February and then just get DUMPED on in late February/early March.
There’s an old saying, “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” By mid-spring we’ll know whether this is drought (climate) or just winter weirdness (weather). But either way, I’m glad I installed rain barrels last year…