More Flowers in the Garden

Out on the patio yesterday in the warmth and sun, and got some pix of more flowers in bloom.  Enjoy.

Our tiny Magnolia, bright pink in bud, but mostly white when blooming (the part the rabbit didn't eat!).

We have one small Azalia that has survived the winter cold.  Beautiful colour.

The Leopard's Bane is now in bloom, one of our early flowers.

Mrs. F.G. bought this Pulmonaria at the Ag Society plant sale, but there was a trespassing Tulip bulb buried in the roots!

The Primrose brings the most colour to the view out my window more than any other flower in May.

The dark blue ones right in front of the window are the brightest colours.

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Our daughter, her partner and our two grandchildren are arriving soon for a week-long visit.  It's been three years since we've seen them, so you can imagine how excited we are!  My blogging may be inconsistent for awhile.

The Coming Change in the Garden

At this time of year it's the coming changes in the garden that i look forward to.  Indeed, the whole world changes here, into greens of every shade.  But the garden plants I can see up close, right outside my window, and they fascinate me.

The Hostas are the plants that change the most right outside my own window, and five of them are showing their usual spikes that will turn into big leaves in various shades of green.  This one in particular is a huge plant, nearly four feet across, when the leaves are full size.  They just seem to appear like magic out of the earth.

At the other extreme is this Hosta with tiny green leaves, here nearly full size already, emerging ahead of any others because it's in the full sun at the front of the house.  In contrast, the ones that are still just spikes are growing in the shade on the north side of the house.

Another of my favourite changes takes place with the ferns, which start out as tightly curled fiddleheads.  This is a Christmas Fern, which stays green under the snow all winter (hence the name).

And I have to compliment Mrs. F.G. on her spectacular tomatoes!  She did get carried away and plant her seed a little early since these can't go out for at least another two weeks, but she's got a wonderful head start of this year's tomato crop.

And here's another mystery plant.  It's just emerging in the first photo, and starting to show green leaves in the second shot.  Anyone recognize it?

The one I posted a week ago today was a white Bleeding Heart.

The Maple Trees are in Flower!

I know most of us watch for the Daffodils and Tulips, but the flowers I watch for are those on the Sugar Maple trees.  They are open right now here in Meaford, and they are fascinating!

The Sugar Maples take on a greenish sheen here, one of the very first trees to do so, and I think many people just think this is just the beginning of the green leaves.

In a way it is, but look closely and you'll see these don't look like leaves.

The closer you look the more likely you are to see the tiny flowers, the precursor of all those maple keys you'll see in the fall.

I cropped this last one a lot, and the flowers, held on those long green stems, are blowing sideways in a slight breeze.  but I hope you can see the tiny stamens sticking out.  So look for a low branch on a Sugar Maple and see what you can see!

Tree Trimming

We had the arborists here Monday to trim a few branches off the big trees out back.  Mrs. F.G. had plotted which branches shaded her garden the most, so they came to cut them down.  We've had the same crew before, and I enjoy watching them and chatting with them.

The hardest and most frustrating thing about the job, one of them told me, is throwing the line up over a branch so they can use it to pull up the bigger rope which them will use to climb.  

But once they've got the larger rope up, up they go!  The leader of this crew, who I chatted with, managed the high ropes course over at Blue Mountain, so he loved the climbing part.

They use a small chainsaw for this work, a saw they can hold in one hand if necessary.  They certainly know what they're doing.

He's kneeling on the branch to be cut down, but they don't cut it all at once.  He climbed out where he could cut the outer portion and dropped it carefully.  You may be able to see he's roped to a higher branch himself.

Meanwhile on the other side of the yard another arborist was leaping up the Norway Maple.  There's inevitably a value judgement in what to cut down.  Our trees are Sugar Maple, Norway Maple and White Ash.  The ash will likely succumb to the Emerald Ash Borer at some time in the future.  The Norway Maple are a troublesome tree that some would say is invasive.  Its heavy leaves can smother the grass, so it's less desirable.  Sugar Maple is the native tree we'd like to keep, so above all else we protect those.

These arborists take a one-year course at college, and this firm has an apprenticeship program.  Arborists are very careful with their ropes, which they buy and care for themselves.  And this crew was very safety conscious.

You can hardly see the larger branch he was cutting down because it's on the back side of the tree.  Overall it was not a big job, and we were very pleased.  They really clean up after themselves too.

More Spring Flowers

The Daffodils provide such a nice burst of bright spring colour it's hard to look beyond them, but we have several more flowers blooming now and I like to chart the progress of the garden.  It's fascinating to watch flowers emerge, bloom and fade as the season goes on.  It's also good practice for me to remember the names since Mrs. F.G. only speaks Latin in her garden!

Right in the narrow strip of garden beside the front door we have these dwarf yellow Iris which I think are really pretty, and they spread voraciously, eating up the plants around them!

And right beside them is this mystery plant for you.  Recognize it?

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In the front garden, mixed in with the Daffodils are these bright Hyacinth.  I like the deep purple ones best.

Blue Primrose have joined the white, and yellow will be close behind.

Our Hellebore has a lot more blooms, but they're still all turning their face to the ground.

Back at the far side of the patio is a clump of Pulmonaria, a flower that I don't remember seeing in bloom before.

And finally our runt of a Magnolia is blooming.  It was headed upwards as a nice shrub the first year, before a rabbit feasted on it for winter nourishment!  Now a few side twigs are trying to make up the difference.

Another Flashback - A Walk in the Woods

While I'm waiting for the rain to end so I can get out and take more pictures, let me share another favourite walk.  Every morning at the old house the dog and I used to walk to the end of the cul-de-sac and head into the woods.  It was a beautiful, short and varied walk which we did in the winter (usually on snowshoes) as well as the summer.  This time I was looking for signs of green a lot.  These photos are from the last few days of April, so about now, but 8 years ago.

It's a nice easy trail into the woods, marked by two big Sugar Maples at the entrance of the old tractor trail.   Not much green showing yet and certainly no leaves in the canopy.

Once I got into the woods and started looking though, I found patches of green on the forest floor.  Some were the bright leaves of Wild Leeks, just glowing in the sun.

Others were the glowing leaves of Dogtooth Violets, a slightly different green, but soon to sport much nicer flowers than the Leeks.

The only leaves I saw were the just emerging reddish leaves of small Pin Cherry trees.

Once I started looking more closely though, I spotted other green on mossy rocks and logs.  Don't know the name of this moss, but you can clearly see the sporophytes standing up straight.

And this is a Broad-leaved Sedge, often mistakenly taken for a grass. 

 

The tiny flowers were in full bloom, very early in the spring.

The Wood Fern Leaves stay green all winter under the snow, and can still be found in the spring.

The promise of this year's fronds is in the still tightly curled fiddleheads that will unfurl soon.

American Beech saplings hold on to their dried crinkled brown leaves all winter, and you can hear them rustling in the breeze.  Apart from bird calls they are often the only sound in the woods in April.

The long pointed buds of those saplings remain tightly curled, waiting for a little more heat, just like me!

Roxie, our Grey County mutt, just loved these walks where she could follow her nose and explore the woods.  She often seemed to be just a nose on four legs.

Standing back for a wider view you can see the smaller bright green patch of wild Leek, the broader carpet of Dogtooth Violet leaves, and the moss on an old log.  This is my memory of the woods in late April.

Flashback - An April 2016 Hike

In April the real hiking season begins, with the snow gone and (slightly) warmer weather.  I often muse back on hikes I took at this time of year, or in the fall, so today I will take you back to a hike a friend and I did from Pinnacle Rock to and beyond Mill Creek.  It's one of the favourite hikes in my memories.  Having my photos and better yet my blog posts helps me a great deal.

We had to hike in on a side trail to get to Pinnacle Rock, an enormous chunk of bedrock that had broken off the Amabel cliffs and flopped over slightly downhill.  It's a well known landmark along the Bruce Trail in the valley.

This is on a large property donated to the Bruce Trail, and the family wanted their recognition plaque attached directly to Pinnacle Rock, it's such a landmark.  Their farm was known as Pinnacle Rock Farm.

On the slope downhill from there we came across a large patch of Hepatica in full bloom.  It's one of our earliest spring wildflowers.

And downhill further we came to this little un-named waterfall.  It's right along the trail, so it's well known; it's on a tributary of Mill Creek which we'll see later on.

This was one of those times when I took my tripod and tried to 'slow down' the water falling onto the  dolostone layer below.  At this point I was of course still using my big Nikon camera.

Now that we've got this far down in the rock sequence we're hiking on the Manitoulin Dolomite, a hard layer that forms the waterfall above, and forms the rim of Mill Creek valley, below.  As you can see, it's composed of many thin flat layers, formed in an ancient delta.

The Manitoulin Dolomite layer, here providing the perfectly flat rim of the valley, is not often recognized, but has a big influence, forming the lip of several of the smaller waterfalls in the valley, and the big plateau of Loree Forest.  We tend to think of the huge cliffs of Old Baldy and we miss this lower thinner geological layer.

It's a long and complex bridge that lets you cross the two shallow channels of Mill Creek in the valley bottom, but it's well built, by an army troop as a training exercise.   It's been appreciated ever since.

And that's the bones of a favourite April hike in my memory, actually the very same date as today.