April 2003

Here we are, it's April 12th, 2003 and look at how things are blooming in the sideyard

Daffodils are still going strong, the tulips are coming along nicely and the heather shows no sign yet of fading.

It's that time of year the wallflowers show their stuff.

Right behind them, seemingly just reaching the windows like a massive bush, is the front-most of our fragrant Peonies. Boy, have they grown over the past 3 weeks. The first flowers buds are developing and I can't wait to see and smell them again.

The first of our tulips have opened up. This variety is called "Monsella". These are all planted in the backyard.

The buds around them will be the White and Red variety called "Carnaval de Nice".

Little did we realize when we planted these that we invited trouble, major trouble. You see, the striations are caused by a virus called 'Tulip Breakin Virus', and it isn't just tulips it affects. The primary vector of transmission for this virus are sucking insects such as aphids, and those suckers quite readily transferred it to our lilies! I've been pulling out infected lily bulbs since I first noticed their infection.

Both in the front and in the back we have a handful of a nice, full, double flowered daffodil of unspecified variety.

These were part of a bulk pack of dafs we picked up for next to nothing this past January at a local nursery that was clearing out all its spring flowering bulbs at 50¢ a package. There were 50 assorted daffodils in the package these came in, so, don't expect us to tell you what the variety is....haven't the foggiest.

These few pictures were taken around 7PM on the 12th of April and the intent was to take some more pictures the following day. Well, that Sunday the 13th it poured pretty much the whole day, so not much was done in terms of pictures or gardening for that matter.We're leaning more to the fairweather gardener side, no point in getting soaked if it doesn't HAVE to be done that day, though we did transplant an Acer before it got too crazy.

One of the things we did manage to capture were some of the little Iris reticulata, which are blooming sort of late for their kind, but they too came from that same batch of 600 or so spring flowering bulbs we planted in January. They'll get transfered to a more permanent location in the front and back later in the season.