Everybody lies

posted on Sunday, March, 21st, 2010 in gardening

After what seemed like an interminable winter spring has finally arrived around here and I couldn’t be happier to finally not see any snow anymore. And sometime during those dark and dreary months the gardening bug bit me. Hard.

I spent the better part of winter grumbling about the snow and the cold and the dark, but also checking out pretty much every single gardening book from the library (and they got shelves of them) and making ever more ambitious plans on how to make our garden even more beautiful than last year. I also never knew how many gardening magazines there are out there. Now I know, because they are strewn all over the house along with the library books.

Unfortunately, most of those plans I made would involve insane amounts of money and/or work to realise them, so I had to scale back my projects to a more manageable size. But there is still a lot I want to tackle as soon as possible. We already started on some stuff, but that is for another post (when I have before and after pictures at hand).

For now, I am sowing seeds left, right and center and check them every 5 minutes to see if anything happened yet. If they all really grow we will be up to our ears in plants in a couple of weeks. Needless to say I have no clue where to find the space to put them all. Right now every windowsill in the house looks something like this:

*

Aren’t they cute? I feel like a proud mom or something.

But what I really love about spring are these fellows:

And those as well:

They show up in all kinds of random places all over the garden, which I think is fantastic. I love it when plants wander around and find the place they like best all by themselves (why does that make me think of Ents? Never mind.).

And since I joined a gardening forum (yeah, I know: what next?), I finally figured out the macro function on my camera (I won’t tell how long I own that thing already, it is way too embarrassing to admit). Which allows me to take pictures like these:

Yes, it was raining today. And yes, I am aware that it is not quite crystal sharp, but hey, it was raining!

Can you tell I love crocusses? To tell the truth, I am a bit obsessed with them right now. They come in such pretty colors.

I don’t even know what the name is for these little ones in english. But aren’t those colors fantastic?

Yeah, you wouldn’t think this is a macro shot, but normally the flower would only be half the size on any photo I took.

But it’s not only the pretty flowers I’m having fun with. There’s also this:

and that:

That last one is really, really tiny in real life. It doesn’t even look like moss, it just looks like some fine green film on the wall.

That one is small as well, but not quite as tiny (it’s a cactus, by the way, in case you’re wondering). But it looks a lot cooler from up close.

And this one is just cute with all the rain drops (did I mention it was raining?). It’s Alchemilla (lady’s mantle).

And this is the proof that my clematis has survived the frost, which is always a gamble with this thing. But it looks fine this year.

Ah, I’m gonna have so much fun with this macro stuff, I tell ya.

Here is another flower I found just yesterday (on a cemetery, of all places).

I already find the normal variety of snowdrops beautful, but this one? Gorgeous.

Of course, some of them went home with me, even though my mom warned me it is bad luck to take things home from a cemetery (yeah, well, good thing she doesn’t know where most of the ferns in our garden are from).

I could go on like this for hours, but I’ll stop now with the flower pics. Just one more of a recent aquisition:

Looks like I will finally get my asian corner somewhere in the garden. Shame that the figurine is quite small, but I think he looks neat. I just have to find a better place for him. For now I placed him so I can see him from the kitchen table. At night I light the little candle in front of him so he doesn’t have to meditate in the dark.

Looks better than garden gnomes anyway.