Finally, here are some pictures

Sara’s flower garden is coming alive with blooms of many varied colors! She is so excited, that the whole family has caught the fever! Our male cat Pinta is absolutely mesmerized most of the time.

Our ten-year old daughter, Hedgehog, loves the Tiger Lily on the back stairs, which my wife grew in a container from a bulb and is thriving this year. It is listed as a “hybrid lily,” but we call it Tiger Lily, after the character in her favorite bedtime story, Peter Pan. All we know for sure is that it’s a member of the Lilium family.

My personal favorite is the pinkish cluster of flowers provided by the Passion Campion (Lychnis viscaria), which is a perennial that we acquired last year. It is a very vigorous plant and starts flowering in late spring.

Sara has several all-time favorites, including the Bulles primrose (Primus x Bulolesiana) which produces orange flowers as far as I’m concerned, but Sara claims they are a shade of yellow.

Another one of Sara’s favorites is the Japanese Snowbell tree (Styrax japonica) next to one of her flowerbeds. This is the perfect time of the year for it to blossom, and it never lets us down. It grows around six to nine meters, and flowers in late spring. We treat it with reverence, since it reminds us of that Nikos Kazantzakis quote: “And I said to the almond tree, sister, speak to me of God, and the almond tree blossomed!”

Also on the back stairs in a container grows what I call a daylily, but Sara insists that I’m wrong. She pegs it as a Zebra Malva (Malva Sylvestris), also know as Mallow. Her gardening books list different types of Mallow, but this one is purple.

The roses that she transplanted from containers into the soil are doing well. Two of them are flowering profusely this year, regardless of a touch of black spot. We removed and burned all the infected leaves and sprayed them with Scorpion Juice in order to inoculate them against further infections. This miracle product from Advanced Nutrients requires spraying every 2-3 weeks during the flowering stage to increase a plant’s immunity. We forgot to spray them when they were in the containers in a different part of the garden.

I suspect that Sara’s very special favorite is the Japanese “Bowl of Beauty” peony (Paeonia lactiflora) which just opened its first flower. It’s a bushy plant, with quite a few buds on it, so we hope for more beauty to come. We feed all our flowering plants with Advanced Nutrients 100% organic nutrients.

Last year we had many poppies, this year our first one just opened. It’s called Beauty of Livermore. It’s a perennial oriental poppy (Papaver orientale) and it’s blood red with the usual black center.

Finally, Sara went to the garden store today and bought some lovely petunias, which will go into a planter box near the back gate. I snapped a picture of them while they were sitting on a patio chair in a box, and I can’t resist posting it. (Being a novice at this, I'll post it next time) Anyway, these pictures will give you an idea of what our garden looks like this year. More enticing visuals to come, to be sure.