the garden

Finally

In flower: 'Cupcake' cosmos

Alleluia! Alleluia! I was sure we weren't going to see these til June!! And that's some oregano coming to life up at the top.

So far...

the snow is very light and not as deep
as forecast...but...
we have a whole night to get through
before it is blown away by the
Big Winds on its heels.

In the meantime
these paperwhites smell lovely

Fresh fruit & flowers

It is very cold outside
and will
they say
turn even colder.
And there is a
Winter Storm Warning.
It is to begin gently tomorrow
and end as a blizzard on Friday.

We are as prepared as we can be
i've pulled out my plumpest down comforter
and we still have
plenty of chocolate leftover from Christmas
and milk, eggs, bread and cheese
fixin's for soup and
to reward ourselves after shoveling snow
we could make lemon mousse
or even a little sparkling lemonade
while we are still hot and sweaty.

Because, in the cold front room
where all the potted plants too tender for our outdoor climate
spend the winter
we have two Meyer lemon trees.

We've already harvested 5 or 6 from this one

while the other has clearly adopted a different time zone
and is once again covered in flowers
which fill the room with their sweet fragrance

i do love winter
and living in a house with large
south facing windows.

3 for Lynette

It is my lovely niece's birthday
and for her
i offer up 3 new-to-my-garden favorites.
Actually
it's 3 photos of 2 "double click" cosmos.

The first blooms on 'Snow Puff'
don't look anything like the blooms that

open a couple of weeks later:

i planted 'Cranberries'
the other double click cosmos
by the alcove where i sit to have breakfast

Happy Birthday, Dear Lynette!
If we lived closer
i'd bring you a bouquet of the real things!

i recollect and report a first, for me

i love black and white photography
however
that love was formed in my youth
with film cameras and a darkroom
while studying Adams, Steiglitz, Kertesz,
Cameron, Atget, and Edward Weston
to name a few.
And in their prints
blacks were so rich you could fall into their depths without fear
because they still held light
and whites glistened and 
in between the two
a delicious spectrum that made one not crave
color.

i spent hours in the darkroom
loving silver coated paper.
And my mentor at school
sent inquiries for black and white printing
to me...which, to this day, still astonishes me.

i've made only one or two attempts
at a bw digital image
and they have all looked like sorry frauds to me
and i simply do not think in bw with these digital
cameras in my hands.

until today
i've not pulled up an image that immediately said,
"oh, yes, this wants to be black and white"
although the lovely vessels in yesterday's post
were a natural almost there
all by themselves
if it weren't for that tiny bit of bluestone in the one corner.

The color images of these Italian arums at Greenwood
growing amidst vinca minor
were inspid and the color balance was all wrong and
it didn't take long in photoshop for me to realize the problem:
they won't look real
they cannot shine as they did when viewing them last May
until i change palettes...

and so i did
and they finally got to sing
a little, at least
even though these are not the finest renditions
being "morphed" as all blogging platforms do to images.

What pleases me most about the whole exercise
is that i am so glad to have finally
in a way
found the rest of my voice
with these new tools.

do click on the images to view a larger version

you can just see the tip of the "flower bud" (is it called a spathe at this stage?)

 

Here is the elegant "flower bud"

Funnily enough
my schedule at Greenwood for the past 8 years has never allowed me
the pleasure of being there when these "bloom"
and, so
i share this beautiful illustration
(although i believe the spathe ends up being almost pure white)
from the public domain
where we can see that it looks very much like a lily

Arum italicum, From the Flora Batava of Afbeeldingen en Beschrijving van Nederlandsche Gewassen, XIII. Deel. (1868) The artisit: Christiaan Sepp

 If you are interested in the cultural information
here is the entry from the Missouri Botanical Garden

hellebore & pink glories in a stone river

they grow at Greenwood
and came along right after the snowdrops

the first

the earliest ones
always come into the house with us

crocus parade & snowdrops

the sweet, early lavender tommies
(those in the banner)
have completed their performance for this spring
and their cousins
C. tommasinianus 'Ruby Giant'
and C. sieberi 'Firefly'
are in puddles all about the garden.

these specie crocus seed themselves about
and multiply like little spring bunnies!

 

In this photo, 'Firefly' appears nearly identical to the species (up in the banner), but in life it has much more intense coloration, and those stamens do glow.

"Ruby", yes. "Giant", not! Their cups are larger, but they are hardly giants.

 

There are fewer snowdrops in the garden now
and at Greenwood, Louis Bauer, our Director of Horticulture
has planted a sweet little collection of bulbs acquired from
Hitch Lyman, America's chief galanthophile

Clockwise, from the left: G. lutea, G. elwesii 'Seagull', G. nivalis 'Sharlockii' (i think.)

 

 

tommasinianus