Early Spring in My Garden

Forsythia blooms in mid-March, 2012, weeks earlier than usual.

Narcissus "Jenny" amidst Forsythia.

Due to global warming, New England weather has been extremely unstable.  In 2010-2011 winter, we had almost one foot of snow every week, with the combined precipitation totaling 80 inches from December 2010 to March 2011. This winter (2011 through 2012 A.D., or, the last year on the Mayan calendar), the combined precipitation was less than 8 inches from December to March , while the average precipitation is nearly 44 inches.

While some of my tulips and narcissi failed to make it through the winter due to the drought, the mild winter has induced spring to come early.  An entire month early. The following photos dated March 14, 2012.

Narcissus "Mount Hood" opens up with a butter-colored trumpet which fades into a beautiful  cream.

Narcissus "Foresight" is a reverse bicolor trumpet with a gorgeous milky center. This cluster of bulbs has been at this location for five years now and returns with more beautiful  flowers every spring.  It is one of the earliest narcissi to bloom. I like to think that it  shows the foresight that spring is here.

Narcissus "Wisley."  Planted in the autumn of 2010 and blooming for the second time since .

N. "Wisley"

N."Wisley"

Narcissus "Wisley" was bred by the late Dutch breeder Karel Van der Beek and named after a beautiful garden in England.

Isn't it beautiful?

Gorgeous!

This beauty is Narcissus "Sagitta."  It is a early-blooming "pink" bicolor narcissus, making it thrice unusual (being pink, bicolor, and early).

N. "Sagitta" blooming for the second season.

N. "Curly Sue"

N. "Curly Sue"

Okay, so I have a fondness for narcissi.  Can you blame me? There are so many varieties that come in all sizes, colors and shapes that I always need to have one more different one!  More on narcissus later. 

Now onto something different.

I also have a fondness for Helleborus, species and hybrids, more commonly known as Christmas rose and Lenten rose. Typically some of these hybrids bloom between late December and spring, often covered under a thick blanket of snow and the flowers frequently get destroyed.  Not a problem this year.  I did not need a shovel to find the flowers.

Helleborus "Party Dress"

Helleborus x ericsmithii "Ivory Prince, " bred by David Tristam.

This plant had bloomed at least one month ago and is now forming beautifully shaped seed pods.

Helleborus x hybrida "Blue Lady," on the top, is dark as the night.   H. "Ivory Prince," on the other hand, is a bright prince in shining armor.

White hyacinth and Tulipa "Toronto" have bloomed in my garden two years in  a roll.

The atypical warm weather in March induced a prized tree peony to send out growth.

Helleborus is a tough plant that grows in partial sun/shade and is difficult to kill.  It does, however, grow slowly, takes a few years to establish, and is difficult to multiple by division.  That leaves the propagation methods to cloning and seed-sowing (did I say that it grows slowly?).  From what I heard, the seeds take a long time to germinate, requiring stratification (hot-cold cycles) to send out growth.  So yeah, it can take a good number of years to see your Helleborus hybrid flower.  I admire the patience of Helleborus breeders.

A single-flowered variety of Helleborus.

Helleborus "Ivory Prince" became established in my garden after at least two years. This is the first year it has bloomed well.

A split-cup narcissus in its third spring blooming.

I am planning on showing off more narcissus (daffodil) photos in my next post.  So be on the lookout for it!!

Happy gardening. :)

In the Beginning

In the Beginning, there were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, according to the Christian, Jewish and Islamic legends (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve).  Jannah, the Islamic word for "paradise," comes from the Arabic word symbolizing "garden" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jannah).  In Chinese literature, 世外桃源 ("peach source outside of this world") conveys a concept of utopia beyond a troubled world where peach blossoms surround a hidden spring, and the land is safe, clean, beautiful and full of happiness.


As I sit in my sunlit dining room, inhaling the scent of Arabic jasmine and beginning my first blog about gardens, I contemplate the meaning of the word "garden" and what it means to me.  Here are few words that immediately come to mind when I think of my garden:

trees

flowers

foliage

fruits
vegetables

birds

butterflies

beauty
scents

nature

man-made

labor

pleasure
sanctuary

Arabian jasmine (Jasminum sambac) is blooming profusely in my dining room right now, scenting the entire room.  This is a treasured plant in many cultures, used to make perfume and flavor tea leaves, appearing in songs, literature and female names.  Once I was even served a whole plate of jasmine buds while dining in China.

A garden is a man-made object, or rather, a project, created with the collaboration of Nature. It is transient, mutable, capricious and impermanent.  It is a thing of beauty yet laden with so much ugliness (think of your roses being mobbed by inch worms and aphids, or all the weeds that threaten to take over your lawn).  It is a labor-intensive project, requiring hours of fastidious and often-time backbreaking work.  And like Lucy in the chocolate factory, the work is non-stop and endless so the moment the gardener slacks off, Nature the task-maker piles on more and more of work therefore he/she will end up either a slave to his/her garden until the day he/she expires or wanting to seek a divorce from it, leaving it abandoned to Nature.


Thank goodness there is snowy winter where I live in New England.

No gardening going on all winter...except caring for the house plants!

And yet we gardeners keep going at it, constantly trying to create the most beautiful and productive gardens we are capable of making.  Why?  Pleasure is the ultimate outcome.  One can call it the by-product of this exercise, next to the thriving rose bushes and sweet plums hanging off trees.  


I have a love-hate relationship with my garden.  Like a truly obsessive-compulsive person, I strive to achieve perfection every spring in my garden.  It is not until all the countless inch worms, born of the winter moths, and the aphids have hatched in May, before I realize that perfection is a dream.  Lily beetles eat holes in my "Shocking" Orienpet lilies despite my efforts in catching and crushing them.  Rabbits and squirrels attack my seedlings and tulip bulbs. Then heat strikes New England in the beginning of June, and all sorts of weeds take over every free spot not occupied (or even occupied) by my plants. By this point, no amount of hand-weeding will ever clear the tenacious soldiers of Nature from my flower patches.  I have long come to the realization that there is better living through chemistry and for those of us who refuse to follow that motto (I stick to organic garden with the exception of fertilizers), imperfection is part of life.  And so no, I do not have a perfect garden, though I try, and try.


To escape from being a slave to my garden, I travel, mostly with my family.  Everywhere I go, I can't help but noticing the gardens in my surrounding.  I scrutinized the garden design, the plant collections, the horticultural skills of the gardeners, the architectural details of attached buildings and the history associated with each garden I had the chance of visiting.  I took photos for myself, gathering ideas of what plants to grow in my garden (if I ever win my fight against the weeds and take over a suitable plot).  After a while, I have a huge collection of garden photos.  Here are a few:

Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A beautiful garden in the Berkshires.

Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris.

Het Loo Palace in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands.

A corner of Humble Administer's Garden (拙政園) in Suzhou, China.

Given the chance, I would like to share the beauty of these gardens with anyone who appreciates them.  After all, the pleasure of discovery is multiplied through sharing.