El Niño showers bring April flowers

OK, so I missed Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, during the most glorious month of the entire year, I missed Foliage Follow-Up, AND I missed my one-year blogiversary on April 17. But here's some photos of my garden anyway. For the perennials, biennials and the heavy reseeding annuals, I've identified whether it's year one ('sleep'), two ('creep') or three ('leap').

Cilantro, an annual cold-weather herb, gone to seed. If you look verrrrrry closely, you can see numerous little bugs feeding on its wittle white flowers.


'La Marne' rose, an antique polyantha rose from 1915. (Sleep)


Purple columbine, a non-native hybrid. Or is it blue? (Creep)


'Mutabilis' rose, an Earthkind-designated China rose from the 1890's. (Leap)


'Old Blush' rose, an antique China rose circa 1752. (Leap)


Old-fashioned single pink hollyhocks. (Creep)


'Blackhawk' black raspberry canes, covered with flowers and baby green raspberries. (Creep)


Kennebec seed potatoes, making flowers, which hopefully means the plants are making potatoes, too!


A precious mound of blackfoot daisies. (Creep)


Four-nerve daisies, going nuts as usual. They NEVER stop blooming. (Creep)


White autumn sage (salvia greggii) going gangbusters. (Creep. The cherry sage died of unknown causes a few weeks ago; an unsolved mystery.)


Rock penstemon, rising from the blackened ashes of last year's drought. Hooray! (Creep)


Another surprising return is this cedar sage. I planted one sprig last spring, which quickly perished within a couple of months. Well, that's that, I thought; you win some, you lose some. Fast-forward to mid-March--I notice all these seedlings popping up with leaves that look oddly like cedar sage, within a 2-foot radius of the original sprig. Two weeks later, they start blooming. Crazy! (Creep)


Spiderwort (another surprise return from a sprig planted last spring), with Bath's pink dianthus in the back, and coreopsis 'Mayfield Giant' behind it. The dianthus smells glorious. (Creep)


On the other side of the Bath's pinks, a field of assorted sedums, which are just starting to bloom. Very exciting as I've never had sedums bloom before. (Sleep)


Fresh strawberries out of the garden--Chandler and Sequoia varieties. At the suggestion of Diana from Sharing Nature's Garden, I'm going to keep them in the ground in this very spot and see if I get an even bigger crop next year. (Sleep)


'Dame du Coeur' rose, from 1958. The light scent of these roses is reminiscent of fresh apples. (Leap) 'Hot Lips' salvia is to the left.


Bright and perky damianita, a Texas native. (Creep)


Oh--and I entered one of these shots into the Gardening Gone Wild photo contest for March. This month's theme is "Green World". Can you guess which photo I entered? Never mind, don't guess - go check out the contest page, and all the entries (including mine), then enter your own!

Happy April!

Words and photos © 2009-2010 Caroline Homer for "The Shovel-Ready Garden". Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.