May 20, 2015

Sedum valens, Revisited

Sedum valens, revisited


Sedum valens


Well, it’s certainly not a plant likely to elicit thunderous oohs and ahhs, but it is, in a comely way, rather beautiful.

It's warm! It's May, and the garden is full of frolicking madness with drifts of aquilegia in dozens of colour combinations, styles and sizes, and wonderful clumps of Iris (of several genera) splotching the landscape in a delightful manner. And many of the Lewisia (rediviva, pygmae, longipetala, cotyledon, nevadiensis, etc.) are still refusing to ‘bow out’ after weeks of blooming. And the Clematis. And the Azaleas, and the Rhododendrons and the, and the, and the, and the.......

Lewisia rediviva


Planted a new Hosta bed yesterday and then moved a few peppers and a couple of tomatoes out of the greenhouse. Something tells me this will be a warm year. We can usually expect five degrees of frost up until the end of May or even early June, but predictions are for nothing below forty in the predictable future. I will still keep a few plants in the greenhouse until early June, just in case.


Dianthus


'Savannah Sunset'


Busy planting and transplanting. When you grow dozens of a hundred or more different plants from seed, and many others from cuttings, there are always too many that desperately need liberating from their pot-bound existence.


Have been suffering a bout of gout for the last two weeks and my movement has been less than half of normal, and the constant pain has meant fitful sleep which only compounds my dreary situation.

Those of you old enough may remember a comic strip titled "Bringing Up Father", featuring Jiggs and Maggie, and you may recall that Jiggs was often portrayed sitting with his painful, gouty, bandaged foot propped up on a stool. I'm not quite there, yet.