April is busting out all over

Life is good. I, like most easterners, am reveling in an extraordinary spell of warm weather this week. I am also congratulating myself on planting iris reticulata and eranthis in the fall; their bright blue and yellow relieves the otherwise rather dull look of the early spring garden.


It’s the power of suggestion—Anna Pavord inspired me to take another look at reticulata (they are her new obsession), while fellow bloggers have long been growing early spring bulbs I never bothered with before. One reason was that the April frosts and freezes made me less than anxious about flowers outside, though I've always had snowdrops.


But here we are: the hellebores are lush, the erythronium are emerging, and the iris and eranthis are more than living up to their word-of-mouth.


You see here Katharine Hodgkin. Pavord says “Close to, it is extraordinary, but in a garden you need to think carefully where to put it. It … certainly does not need noisy neighbors.”


Well, my early April Buffalo garden is far from noisy. Katharine Hodgkin can shine here—and will shine even more when I plant more in the fall.