Everything is Blooming!

This has been the most glorious spring for our yard. It's only now getting hot and dry--now that it's almost June.

Our new Ingrid Bergman tree rose, planted where we dug out the rocks along the driveway. We had almost given up on the tree roses, until the dead sticks started growing new shoots.

There are green cherries on the new cherry tree!

The front yard garden is mostly all planted.

Beautiful broccoli.

Aspens by the front door, in the last light, shivering and rustling. There is a beautiful passage in a James Russell Lowell poem, "The Singing Leaves":
Only the pattering aspen
Made a sound of growing rain
That fell ever faster and faster
Then faltered to silence again.

There are Siberian Iris by the side gate, and a small patch of strawberries.

And a visitor inside the iris, that I didn't see when I was taking the picture. What in the world kind of bug is this?

Then on to the backyard garden, the messy, work-in-progress garden. Everything back here has to be reclaimed from years of neglect and overgrowth. And the cursed, cursed, rocks, with weeds growing up through them, that are everywhere. Why would someone landscape a one-third acre lot with mostly rocks? I guess so you don't have to water. But it has been a frustrating thing to inherit. Before you can plant, you have to excavate. Charlie also charged through the beds and ruined a few early crops, so we built a rabbit fence around them.

One of two lilac bushes. This one is much more fragrant than the other one. It makes you swoon when you walk by.

The peonies are close to being my favorite thing about the house. There are two more back here that never flower--maybe they don't get enough sun. And a gorgeous ruffly paler pink one in front of the house, that is just about to burst into bloom.

They are also delicately scented. Just an impossibly lovely flower.

English peas, planted around St. Patrick's Day. They are still not blossoming or setting pods. I don't know if I should be worried. They are lush and beautiful though, climbing their trellises.

There are some really dazzling parts of this yard, that survived the neglect of intervening years. I love the dwarf blue spruce when the giant purple alliums are blooming all around it. I think these allium are called Star of Bethlehem.

R carried her net around the backyard tonight "collecting treasures." I love to see what she collected. Some of Charlie's tennis balls and a mysterious golf ball; his squirrel toy with the stuffing gone, that looks heart-stoppingly like a real massacred squirrel when you find it in the grass; some pretty rocks; lilacs and an allium blossom.