Spring at Last! Spring at Last!

Every plant in my front and back yard tells a story.  And they were out telling their stories this past weekend.

This primrose was rescued from the mid winter clearance rack of Wegmans several years ago. I planted it out when weather permitted and it has thrived since.

The first time I ever experienced primroses was during a trip to Seattle in February of 1977.  It seemed like every streetcorner had a planting of them.  Just seeing flowers in bloom in February was enough to get my heart pounding.  In Seattle, we also saw flowering cabbage and kale for the first time.  I love them, but we have a big groundhog problem, and they eat them right up.  So, all of our plants have to be groundhog-resistant.

This, another primrose, was rescued from my mother in law's yard when the overzealous lawn maintenance company who tends her property decided to go on a search-and-destroy mission, keeping things tidy at the expense of any unsuspecting plant that even remotely resembled a weed.

This is a variegated brunneria.  This came from Gibbs Garden Center in LeRaysville, Pennsylvania.  The nice thing about Gibbs is that they are in a harsher zone than we were, so anything that grows there will grow here.  I love the small blue flowers.  Much of our back yard is shady, and it can be a challenge to find perennials for that type of area.  The woman at Gibbs taught us how to garden in shade.  Unlike sun perennial gardening, you go for interesting leaf color or structure rather than large, showy flowers.  This plant is a perfect example of that principal.

 A white hyacinth, and I wish blogs had "smell-o-blog" because the scent of this flower could fill an entire room.

These are some of the daffodils we have.  Our daffodils are a mixture of early, mid season and late.  We get ours from a mail order nursery, Brecks.

Spring....I so wish the weather forecasts are wrong, the sun comes out, and the flowers continue to bloom.