The Variegated Thumb

Sorry for my unplanned hiatus over the last couple of weeks.  Life has been very busy!

As Spring approaches. more blooms are appearing - inside my greenhouse and outdoors.  I’ve gotten a couple of Gerbera daisy plants as gifts over the last 3 years or so.  Usually they were blooming when I received them, but I could never coax another bloom out of them.  For some reason, I’ve had trouble with them drying out and wilting, only to be revived again when I noticed and gave them a healthy watering.  But I never could keep them happy long enough to bloom - until now!

My first ever "earned" Gerbera daisy bloom

This Gerbera daisy just bloomed last week and still looks great.  Gerbera blooms seem to last quite a while.

The spring Crocus have broken through.

In the corner garden, Daffodil, Tulip and Crocus stems have risen.  Only the purple crocus are blooming so far, but soon they will be joined by the orange crocus and the Daffodils.  It might be closer to May before we see Tulip blooms.

Buds on our Quince bush

Our Quince bush is covered in buds again and will be opening up any day now.  It is a sight to behold.  We’ll probably be taking cuttings every couple of days to bring inside and enjoy at our dining table.

We have a large quince bush in our backyard that presents a beautiful display of color in the early Spring, late Winter.  A number of people have asked me if it produces fruit and I always reply that it is just a flowering quince.  My neighbor, who has a degree in landscaping, told me that it probably still produces fruit.  Until recently, the only thing I had seen that resembled fruit was a little hard, dried and shriveled brown thing that I wasn’t really sure about.  I suspected it might be something that wasps make, called a gall, after reading about them in a plant book.

Unknown growths on my quince bush (foreground left and background right). Might be a gall produced by a wasp.

I’ve tried looking online for similar galls on quince bushes, but haven’t found any.  I’m not really sure what those things are.  But sometime over the last week I spotted a definite fruit on my quince bush, for the first time.  This bush is just covered in blooms in the Spring, and yet, somehow, only one fruit formed on the whole bush.

The first real fruit that I have found on my quince bush (Chaenomeles speciosa)

I scoured the bush, looking very closely at every branch, trying to find additional fruits, but the only thing I could find was what looks like 2 dead fruits that might be from last year.  I’ll have to look more closely in the future.

Dead fruits overlooked until recently and possibly produced last summer.

If anyone knows what the mystery growths from the first picture might be, please let me know!

I have a flowering quince bush in my backyard that has been there - probably - since shortly after the house was built in 1956.  During most of the year it is a nice, full green bush.  But for one month of the year, it is absolutely beautiful, covered in pink blossoms.

Quince blooms

Quince blooms

By the last week of January, the bush is covered in little round beads of pink.  The bush is attractive enough at this point.  The buds are nearly as attractive as the actual blooms.  Then, a couple of weeks later all of the buds begin to open and will continue for about a month.

Full quince bush in bloom

The bare limbs and pink blooms have a wonderful artistic look.  The branches remind me of Asian art that incorporates so many blooming trees.  You can already see the first of the green leaves coming out.  The pink blooms will stay on the bush for a week or two after the leaves have come out before falling away.

Quince blooms

I love that this bush blooms before anything else in my yard.  Other than this bush, my backyard looks like it is the dead of winter, but this bush declares that Spring is not far away.

Already I have some Daffodil buds visible and tulips are starting to break through the surface of the soil.  It won’t be long.

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a project at work that had me computing the angle of the sun above the horizon across the US at all times of the day. Apparently the companies that take the high resolution overhead photographs for Google Earth and other mapping utilities require that the sun be at least 30 degrees above the horizon. When I started the project, about half of the US had a solar angle lower than 30 degrees all day long. Now the entire US reaches a solar angle greater than 30 degrees each day.

Kingdom Plantae has noticed! Here are some pictures of the bloomage occurring in my house and yard.

Several flowers I didn’t get to until they had already wilted - including our crocuses.  I forgot to get a picture of our Flowering Quince bush when it was all blooms and no leaves, but here’s what it looks like today:

Our Tulip tree (saucer magnolia) is starting to get big.  Since it has a lot of branching at ground level, I have been trying to thin it out a little each year so that it will be somewhat tree-like.  I think it is coming along pretty well.  I will probably have to remove a couple more branches this year.  Here’s the gorgeous blooms:

We have 3 different color combinations of Daffodils in our back flower garden (all yellow, light yellow with dark yellow center, and white with orange tinted center).  Here’s two of them:

We planted a flowering cherry tree 2 years ago and within a couple of months we noticed something horribly wrong with it.  Even though it was really just a 6 foot tall twig, it appeared to have been struck by lightning or diseased or something.  Half of it had turned black and ceased growing.  There is a clear line running straight down it’s skinny trunk.  All new growth has come from the other half.  We’ve been debating whether to dig it up and move it to a less prominent location, since we had strategically positioned it to overhang our corner garden.  But this year it surprised us.  It has its first ever cheery blossom coming out and they look to be ready to open very soon!  Can you see them in the foreground?:

I received this flowering peach tree last year as a gift and it was covered in 2 colors of blooms when we planted it.  I’m glad to see it burst forth color again this year.  It has both magenta and light pink blooms intermixed on all the branches:

I overwintered 4 cyclamen indoors that had been very healthy all year outdoors.  They lost most of their leaves and went dormant during the winter, so I don’t know how they will do with the transition.  Here is a new cyclamen that I just planted.  It also has 2 colors blooms:

These are the amaryllis that I wrote about in my previous post.  I have had them for several years now and they rebloomed for me this year.

I also wrote in my last post about getting my Christmas cactus to rebloom.  Well, I have a friend that just moved to Ireland for a couple of years and left her plants behind with me while she’s gone.  Her Christmas (Easter?) cactus didn’t bloom at the same time as mine did, but just surprised me with some blooms in the last couple of weeks:

This one’s not really a bloom, but I was very happy to see this new little guy’s foliage coming out this year.  I just planted this Japanese Maple tree last year and I wasn’t sure that he was going to make it.

The tulips we planted in the backyard have bloomed a couple of weeks sooner each year than those in the front yard.  I will have to post again when our tulip-filled front flower bed is in bloom.  Here is the first of our backyard tulips:

We bought another azalea this year.  The price was irresistible ($2.48)!  Hopefully the ones we planted last year will bloom again for us.  They might need some fertilizer encouragement.  Here’s our new one:

I was suprised to see these tiny blooms on my little leopard lily (an indoor plant).  The blooms actually have little purple stamens coming out of the white flowers.  I couldn’t pick up the detail with my camera though.

I will post more blooms as they arrive.  I expect to have a BUNCH of tulips, some daylilies, irises and who knows what else!