I'm so excited!

The song,  I'm So Excited, by the Pointer Sisters is running through my mind right now.  I guess that dates me. Oh. Well.

If you're wondering what I'm so excited about, it's THIS!!!  It's a passionflower bud! 

 Two years ago I received a seed packet for this beauty from my friend Katie. I followed the directions and nicked the seeds and planted up a few in little peat pots and started them in a cold frame. Eventually I planted 2 in my raised garden bed and watched as they grew very slowly.  At the end of the season I wasn't real impressed.  That winter we had some very cold weather for our area.  About when we thought things were back to normal we had another big storm.

Surprisingly, last spring the plants were back and I transplanted one to a big pot and put a neat little trellis in the pot and watched as it grew up and beyond that trellis. I moved the pot over along a fence and attached some wires for it to grow along.  Boy did it grow.  It had lots of foliage but not a single flower.  I was later told that it can take years for a passionflower plant to actually flower when grown from the seed. 

Two days ago I was out in the garden, looking at all the new growth this plant is putting out when I noticed that some of it is different than the rest.  I pinched off one of these little buds and peeled back the leaves to reveal the beginning of a flower.  I'm SO excited!  Oh, I said that already.  Really, I am so looking forward to this plant being covered with blooms.  I hope it has a very extended bloom season.  I'll definitely be posting photos of the blooms.

I'm also excited about this...my first bearded iris bloom of the season on April 21st.  I can't remember its name right now and I can't seem to match it up to the order information that I can find from Schreiner's Iris Garden up in Salem.  (Sadly I have misplaced some of that information and over time the little tags break down in the weather.)  No matter what its name, it is gorgeous and I am so glad to have iris blooming now.  Many of my other iris plants have buds forming and for the first time I will have some bearded iris blooming in the backyard.   I'm so excited!

Here's a little photo page I did 3 years ago after a trip to Schreiner's Iris Garden.  Love that place.  If you've not been there put it on your bucket list.  They have 10 acres of display gardens filled with spring flowers.  It's seasonal so check to see when the best time to visit is before you go.

This also gets me excited each year, a dogwood and azalea blooming together. It's not in my yard but in that of some friends a couple blocks away.  This is so beautiful to see that I will purposely take the slower way home just so I can look at it.  Our dogwood tree died after a hard winter storm about 3 or 4 years ago.  It was with the house when we bought it and not nearly as large as the tree in the picture, but a really nice accent in front of our house. 

And just around the next corner is this beautiful rhododendron.

One more turn and I get to see this yard with wisteria, azaleas and a rhododendron. It makes for a nice drive through the neighborhood.

Today while out in the garden I noticed this cutie.  I've never noticed the poppy in this state between flower and seed pod.  It reminded me of a little ballerina with her tutu.   She was an orange poppy like you see in the background.  Orange isn't my preferred color but these are so bright and cheerful in the garden that I just let them do their thing. They are up against our dark grayish-blue house and actually look quite nice.  They spread through seed and the plant is easy to recognize so I could just pull them all out, but why? 

 The daisies started blooming today.  I have masses of them.  They're like a weed but I love them and they are easy to pull out if I get tired of them.  Now, I didn't say they will be easy to get rid of, they send out about a bazillion seeds and come up all over the place.  When they get big enough I just pull out any I don't want.  The lucky ones that get to stay are here to brighten up the yard.  It's been real cloudy today so I didn't get out to take a picture but I have this one from a few years ago.  

I suppose that is enough excitement for one day!  I'm sure tomorrow will bring its own excitement. 

Thanks for visiting.  Feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to know you stopped by.

Wildflower Wandering

This afternoon I had the opportunity to go out to Mt. Pisgah Arboretum, just outside of Eugene, to wander around with my camera.  It was gorgeous!  I've never visited when there was so much in bloom.

Hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed being there.  It was very peaceful and although there were other people there, I only encountered 6 while I was on the trails. I saw plenty of butterflies and birds but they seemed pretty camera shy so I got no photos of them.

The camas lilies were  so pretty and there were so many!  The meadow was filled with them.

Trillium. I just saw one clump of them so I don't know if it's early or late in the season for them or if I needed to go further up the hill to find more.

The Willamette River. 

I just love this old building.  

What's up Buttercup?

An opportunistic flower growing a couple feet off the ground in this tree trunk.

 

Go if you ever get the chance.

Thanks for visiting.  Feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to know you stopped by.

The view from my living room window

I really enjoy the view into the backyard from the living room window, part of which can even be seen all the way from the front door.  I took the photo from indoors while standing at the back window.  The colors are fun and cheerful and there is so much growth going on out there! 

As I look around I can see so many things that I have reclaimed and re-purposed.  Boy, I used to hate it when my parents wanted to go to garage sales or antique (junk) stores.  I just didn't get it when I was younger.  Now I enjoy it, to a point.  And I enjoy finding a new way to put something to use.  And I especially like NOT spending a bundle of money on the projects.

The 2nd, enlarged photo is numbered to show the various items I have reclaimed.

1. arbor - offered to me by a neighbor who was having a new one built
2. old window -  from Craigslist (CL) glass removed and replaced with chicken wire, now used as a door
3. pickets - from CL - fence pulled apart, pickets cut down and then reassembled, there are 2 sections of this picket fence
4. window - given to me by Dad when he learned I was looking for an old window. Some glass painted over with chalkboard paint, others replaced with corrugated plastic purchased at BRING recycling, 2x2 frame added to make it the sized I needed
5. retired fence - this is the fence that started it all. I saw it lying along the road and asked the owner for it so I could build a chicken coop.
6. window trim - from a neighbor's remodel, I saw the dumpster out front and asked if I could look for anything I might be able to use. I cut it up and made a window so I could see my chickens when they are in the back part of their compound.
7. fence - asked a neighbor if I could have some panels of a fence they were replacing, brought home 4, did a little repair and installed 2 panels to close off this side of the compound
8. wheelbarrow - this came with the house when we bought it 23 years ago. It got more and more rusty and the handles fell off. Eventually I dismantled it from the frame and moved it to the back border and filled it with bulbs. 
9. window - picked this up at a recycle/resale center up in Portland, someday will probably build a window box for it
10. chairs - St. Vinnie's, thought I would redo them for indoors but realized they were a lot rougher than I thought (love is blind, they say) so I sprayed them and put them around the table outdoors.  The paint isn't holding up very well but I suppose it adds to their charm.
11. GARDEN sign (shown at the top left of the previous photo) cropped out of this photo - when yet another neighbor did a bunch of demolition on a house he bought I asked if I could go through his discards.  I got so many treasures from his place!  This old piece of wood was one of them, I later distressed it and made the sign out of it.  The more I took from his dump trailer the less he had to haul off.  We both won. 

(If you click on the picture you will be able to see an enlarged version.)

Perhaps later I will photograph more of my reclaimed and re-purposed items around the garden.

I sure met a lot of neighbors while working on my projects. I even made some good friends in the process.  I lost all fear of asking people if I could have what they were throwing out. What's the worst that could happen?  They could say "no".  Oh, I suppose I could worry that they might talk about their eccentric neighbor (me) to the other neighbors but I guess I wanted their junk bad enough to not worry if they wanted to discuss me with someone else. 

Thanks for visiting.  Feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to know you stopped by.

Garden bloom tour April 2015

Let the garden tour begin in the  backyard with this potted candy tuft which I had to move up onto a stand to keep the chickens from digging out all the soil.

The flowering crab apples put on quite a show this year.  

This is a new bleeding heart plant I picked up at the Good Earth home show.  I need to move it because it turns out there is a hosta planted in almost the exact same spot.

 

Wood hyacinths, love the color.

There are half a dozen or so of these dark tulips in the raised bed.

The magenta tulips have really had some wow factor.  I like their pointed petals and bright color. I have them in several places.

So glad the tulips bloomed in the windowbox on the back fence.  It is gorgeous when you see the flowering crab apple and the tulips together.

Moving out to the front yard now.

New azalea I picked up at Costco.  It's a nice bright color in the border between the driveway and the grass where I recently pulled out all the knickknick.  (Update:  This azalea had to move to the backyard in 2016 because it couldn't handle the heat and dry soil out front.  It's near the chicken compound now.) 

Carmine Cosmos. Hoping it does well and reseeds so I have more next year.

The dianthus survived winter in their posts up against the house.  I gave them a nice haircut and they have started to bloom real nicely.

 Forget-me-not, what a lovely color.

Grape hyacinths, love 'em and hate 'em.  They come up all over the place.  I constantly remove them, but I do love their color.

A heuchera in a pot on the porch.

So excited that the lilac has FINALLY bloomed.  I started this one in a pot several years ago and was giving up on it.  The mother plant died after last February's ice storm.  It was a lovely surprise for this one to have 6 blooms this spring.

This rhody came with the house, I think this year it is blooming the best it has in 23 years.

I do have a thing for tulips!

I am so looking forward to the peony blooms and all the bearded iris too.

And I hope to keep posting photos of my garden as it grows so I have a diary to look back on.

Thanks for looking!  Though I am not a "real" garden blogger I will link this up with Carol from May Dreams Gardens for the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day.