Spring Flowers

Its been an intense few days as I tried to carry out all the jobs in the garden that would normally take a week. I am expecting a gardening club to visit this Saturday and suddenly I realised that there was no time and the weeds are everywhere and my children cannot be cajoled into helping! Other commitments meant yesterday was the big day and I worked from 6.30am to 6pm. After working at school today I came home and worked another couple of hours until it got dark. The garden is not finished (when is it ever finished?) but it will have to do because I am working the next couple of days.

This didn't stop me from taking time out to photograph a few special things that are looking good to share with you. In the first photo you can see the sky blue flowers of a rosemary and the pale blue flowers of an ipheion. I think the rosemary is a cultivar called 'Mozart' which was apparently selected by a nurseryman in California and named after the street in which his nursery stood in Los Gatos. It grows really well for me in a dry spot and flowers profusely every spring and also provides heaps of leaves for all my lamb roasts! The ipheion is I think uniflorum and has survived a recent move. It comes from Argentina and is a reliable bulb coming up year after year.

The second photo is of Deutzia gracilis which came to me labelled as white and then startled me when it first flowered by being pink. It was promply moved out of my 'white garden' and has thrived ever since although it does better with a little extra moisture. It looks fantastic when in bloom then pretty drab for the rest of the year. It suckers too.

The third photo shows a Ferula communis at the base of the deutzia. The hollow stems of the flower spike of this giant fennel were reputedly used to transport the glowing coals at Olympia in Greece as part of the ancient olympics. The ferula has great ferny green foliage (there is a more glaucous form too) and the flower spikes are metres in height with typical yellow fennel flowers.