April showers bring May flowers, but this year it was April and May snows that eventually retreated that allowed some May flowers in a compress time so different varieties were blooming at the same time when normally they wouldn’t be. Now the wood violet is adding color amongst the white wood anemones and sometimes you can find a cluster of color.
A dear friend recently told me that ‘family does not have to be blood, sometimes they are just different flowers growing in the same garden’. Even if these violets are the same species, each is slightly different in size, color or flaws from insect damage but their uniqueness, like in people, create a beautiful garden.
A red barn against the white snow presents a striking scene, but I think I prefer the green with the red look instead. And I like the old barns which time has shaped and given them interesting characteristics.
It sounds like a contradiction in terms to have a ‘yellow’ violet, but finding the non ‘violet’ violet adds the yellow color to the springtime ground that isn’t a dandelion. There several varieties of the yellow violets, and this bright yellow flower may be the Downy Yellow Violet and it provides some color to the rainy, grey days.
Jack-in the-pulpits are an odd looking wildflower and what appears to be the flower, the pulpit, is not the flower. The flowers are actually hidden inside the ‘flower’. The Jack-in the-pulpits are also unusual in that each plant has a particular sex instead of having both female and male parts. If you looked inside the pulpit, you would see either yellowish brown anthers if a male or a cluster of tiny green berries if a female.
What is also strange about this wildflower, is that the plant will change sex from year to year. Since the female has the harder job of making the seeds and getting the seeds ready for the birds to disperse them, if the year was not a good one for storing food to the corm, the plant in the fall will make a bud for a male flower and one leaf. If it had been a good year and the corm is packed with nutrients, the plant produces a bud for female flowers and, usually, for two leaves, to make more sugars by photosynthesis.
So like the many of the birds, the female Jack-in the-pulpits has most of the work and since she does the work, I don’t think it should be called ‘Jack’ in the pulpit but guys do get most of the credit!
The Civil War claimed more lives than any conflict in U.S. history, requiring the establishment of the country’s first national cemeteries. By the late 1860s Americans in various towns and cities had begun holding springtime tributes to these countless fallen soldiers, decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers.
On May 5, 1862, General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance later that month. “The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land,” he proclaimed. The date of Decoration Day, as he called it, was chosen because it wasn’t the anniversary of any particular battle.
Memorial Day, as Decoration Day gradually came to be known, originally honored only those lost while fighting in the Civil War. But during World War I the United States found itself embroiled in another major conflict, and the holiday evolved to commemorate American military personnel who died in all wars.
For decades, Memorial Day continued to be observed on May 30, the date Logan had selected for the first Decoration Day until Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1968, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in May in order to create a three-day weekend for federal employees.
Memorial Day marks the start of summer vacations but hopefully people still remember the real reason of Memorial Day and not just think of it as a three day weekend; that they remember the sacrifices of those fallen in service to our country. Their names may have faded from the headstone, but don’t let their sacrifice fade from our memories.
The Trillium also known as Trinity Flower and since today is Trinity Sunday, the Great White Trillium is the perfect picture for today. While St. Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity, others have used the Trillium since every part was threefold. The leaves are three, the petals are three, and the sepals are three.
When I was mowing lawn yesterday, I had to stop several times to take some pictures of the clouds. There was a ring around the sun and other clouds had rainbow colors in them. Away from the sun, the ‘horse tail’ clouds or Cirrus clouds filled the sky.
The Cirrus clouds consist almost exclusively of ice crystals that appear on the sky in white delicate patches or narrow bands, and it was those ice crystals that caused the colorful ring around the sun and the rainbow clouds.
The common English name for a cirrus cloud is Mare’s Tails since the long threads of cloud often resemble a horse’s tail. Cirrus clouds are sometimes a sign that wet and stormy weather might be coming. And that it did, as it rained during the night, which won’t help getting the fields planted.
A field of dandelions can actually look pretty in the spring time by adding yellow color against the new green grass. The part I hate is when they turn white and the seeds start blowing in my face. But I suppose the finches and other birds are happy to have the seeds to eat and the bees like the nectar and pollen.
Dandelions are thought to have evolved about thirty million years ago in Eurasia and probably arrived in North America on the Mayflower – not as stowaways, but brought on purpose for their medicinal benefits.
That weed most are trying to get rid of, are more nutritious than most of the vegetables in your garden and are among the most expensive items in the grocery store. The roots are dried and sold as a no-caffeine coffee substitute – for $31.75 a pound.
Whether you love them or hate them, dandelions are, quite possibly, the most successful plants that exist; masters of survival worldwide.
Well one might think of colored leaves in the fall, but the spring can provide a range of color too; from the red buds, the light green leaves to the red color of new oak leaves.
The Virginia Bluebell is a hardy, North American early spring-flowering perennial with delicate, terminal clusters of light pink buds, which open to flared, long-tubular, sky-blue to purple flowers. Also known as Virginia Cowslip, Mountain Cowslip, and Roanoke Bells.
On April 16, 1766, in one of his earliest observations in his Garden Book, Thomas Jefferson noted, “the bluish colored, funnel-formed flower in the low grounds in bloom.” It was introduced to Britain by 1700 and Williamsburg’s John Custis sent roots to his patron Peter Collinson in the 1730s. According to Philip Miller’s 1754 edition of Gardener’s Dictionary, the seeds came earlier from a Reverend John Banister in the 1600s, but the plants died out.
