Saturday, May 23, 2009

Blooms to Warm a Gardener's Heart

The alpine garden produced its first blooms yesterday, displaying this tiny Daffodil "Tete-a-Tete". The whole plant is less than 6 inches tall. The early spring color has inspired me to add more bulbs to this bed next fall. In fact, I already took advantage of the Veseys catalog coupon to buy more of these same Daffodils along with some Siberian squill, crocuses, and Allium roseum.

Other yellow blooms were dutifully collected by the 2-year-old, very helpful assistant gardener. I call this chemical-free dandelion control (she calls it her "flower pot"):

Pink and purple Pulsatilla vulgaris and blue Chionodoxa make a splash of color in the sloped rock garden. It's so nice to see these flowers NOT covered in snow, for a change.

Pulsatilla vulgaris takes a few years to develop a good-sized clump. This pale purple one is my biggest plant, at three years old:

2 comments:

Philosophical Karen said...

My Pulsatilla vulgaris finally developed to a good size last spring, and then the whole clump just died on me. I am starting over now with the seedlings that sprang up from the original plant.

(Not sure what happened, but we had an extremely wet summer last year, so maybe the roots rotted? I suppose it could also have been a digging animal. We are known to get skunks in our garden.)

easygardener said...

Pulsatillas are beautiful, I've bought a white and purple to go with the red I've already got. I like the way the flowers are followed by silky flower heads.