Portrait of a backyard?

Our first new Frida Kahlo floribunda rose bloom! I bought this for its interesting color:

The first lilies

A few lilies have opened up in a sea of buds:

Cannot wait for all those colorful day-lilies to show their true colors :-)

A nested hypothesis

A juvenile finch (is it a house finch or a purple finch?) just days before it flew away. There are now two such nests atop our front door:

The Monarch of all Weeds

Hoping to see some Monarch butterflies at my Milkweed Row. I don't think there have been many these past few years! Could the interspersed day-lilies be scaring them away?

A Profusion of Peonies

Love these large blooms with their heavy scent and deer tolerance!

Bugged by weeds

I was pulling out weeds from the cracks in my driveway when I stopped after seeing this beautiful sight:

I pulled out my cell phone instead, and snapped a quick picture. Not that the ladybug was in any hurry to leave!

I left the weed alone, to fight another day.

For your irises only

Myriad iris blooms, brilliant but ephemeral:

Flocks of phlox, and other spring miscellania

These are recovering nicely along our stone wall after I shifted them out of the pots they inhabited unhappily for several years:

The alium bulbs I planted last year are alive and well! This is a minor miracle, since the rest of the bulbs I bought at Kmart last year were rotted in the bag and had to be returned:

Bleeding hearts resurrected. One of the small set of reliable shade-loving perennials that can add color without much light and tolerate New England winters:

It's Azalea-time!

I planted these azaleas right below the roof-line, which is perhaps not ideal. The snow sliding off the roof tends to flatten the plants, and they are still quite small. Yet they have bloomed a bit this year. I'll perhaps have to engineer some contraptions to keep the snow away from them for a while:

A Beautiful and Fragrant Invasion

Some Lily of the Valley plants seem to have migrated from all the way across the street. Pretty and poisonous!

This is a purple-and-white orchid columbine from Home Depot:

A pink-and-white version planted in the same area decided it has had enough of the vacillating spring already. Perhaps it will come back stronger next year?

Of Bleeding Hearts and Azaleas

The bleeding hearts are back with a bang after it looked like they had not survived the fall season, let alone the winter. What a lesson in resilience! It likes the shade too, which is a huge blessing in my yard:

Our two fledgling azaleas are beginning to come into their own. They get snow dumped on them from the roof above, yet somehow find the extra will to bloom in the spring:

Cost-effective lawn maintenance

You too can have a great-looking lawn without spending tonnes of money on seeding, fertilizers and water bills. The key is to give it a good mow, find the right spot to stand in, and wait for the optimal lighting conditions. If it rains once in a while, even better.

My scraggly lawn is pictured below, photographed after a fresh morning mowing followed by light rains. The evening cloud cover provides just the right luminous intensity to hide the numerous barren patches strewn about :-)

The diminutive primrose

I picked up a few perennial primrose plants last year and planted them in a partly shady corner near our car-port. It produced some nice flowers but then it appeared to whither away prematurely. I thought it was due to the pesky chipmunks that have drilled giant mine-shafts all over the place and near their roots. What chance does a frail plant have against such aggression?

The primroses proved me wrong. I did not even notice the buds forming, yet they are suddenly in bloom!

The hyacinths have come and gone

The hardy hyacinths were among the first to bloom, and they somehow were ignored by the deer while they hid in plain sight:

These blooms have now dried up, making way for other plants to step into the limelight. Even the vibrant forsythia are winding down:

Spring is sprung!

A picture is worth a thousand words, so goes the saying. Unless the words were penned by someone like William Wordsworth. As his name suggests, his words are worth... a lot! Here is one of his poems, apt for the new spring season, with some fresh garden flowers to go with them:

Daffodils

by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
  That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
  A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
  And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
  Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
  Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
  In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
  In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
  Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodils.

When math is exotic and seasonal

Check out this Romanesco Broccoli that was in the produce section for just a few days:

It is also known as Roman Cauliflower, and is an example of fractals in nature. I did not have the courage to buy it, but am informed by Wikipedia that it has a "nutty" flavor.

Math in the produce aisle

I like to tell my kids that math is everywhere. Sometimes sitting in plain sight, and sometimes hiding behind a few seemingly innocuous curtains. It came sharply into focus yesterday when I sliced a purple cabbage in half. Check out the double Fibonacci spiral that was revealed!

I have never seen a cabbage in this light before.

Frozen turkey

A group of turkeys is apparently either a flock, or a rafter. Let's go with the latter as the word of the day. At least for me!

It looks like a rafter was up and about last night, as evidenced by their footprints all over the snow that started falling in the evening:

My friendly neighborhood rafter surely does not seem to be deterred by a few inches of snow, though. While they have made a daily appearance for several weeks now, and have spent significant amounts of time rooting around my bird feeder and elsewhere, they showed up like clockwork today after nearly seven inches of powder blanketed the region overnight.

Only this time, they stayed on the road (which had been plowed) and steered clear of the yard:

I learned a few days ago that a rafter usually has only one male. This guy was preening away to distract from the lack of food on the road surface:

Trust this one female turkey to throw caution to the wind and plow into the yard! Must have been one hungry bird:

Later in the day, I saw the entire rafter on the side of the house, where the snow had melted enough to expose some of the ground, and they had a field day raking up the soil in search of... frozen worms?!

A thankful day

There is much to be thankful for in this world of ours. These wild turkeys, for instance, must be thankful to be in a vegetarian's yard on Thanksgiving Day!

A dash of blue

The drab environment is occasionally splashed with brilliant blues and reds. A gang of blue jays descended on our feeder and proceeded to monopolize it and the ground around it for the next half hour or so.

I recently read (thanks to two very funny and informative bird books* by Mike O'Connor) that blue jays often store seeds in their throats and cart them away for future consumption. here is a view of such behavior:

An action shot of a jay at work:

Scouting the ground (for fallen seeds or acorns?) while other "family" members sampled the feeder fare:

Showing off the blues:

"Why are you staring at me?"

*The two books reference above are:

M. O'Connor (1997) "Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches? And Other Bird Questions You Know You Want to Ask."

M. O'Connor (2013) "Why Do Bluebirds Hate Me? More Answers to Common and Not-So-Common Questions about Birds and Birding."