Celery really is offensive
Heucheras after the winter snow

Spring at last

Back in Pennsylvania now and in the last couple of days winter has been transformed into spring. As in the wild, the snow recedes and the crocuses pop up and open. The ice on the lake is still 6in thick (so I won't be needing my new season’s fishing license quite yet), but the snowdrops are out at last, buzzing with honey bees but impossible to photograph in the wind. Crocus tommasinianus flares its petals and the witch hazel is out.

Hamamelispallida500 Bought last summer, the buds of Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’ started to open in December and then simply stopped, the spidery petals half unfurled. Now in nearly 60F they open but, as the picture reveals, the tips are burnt and they seem a little wan. That lovely sweet scent is there, but not as powerful as I expected.

Low down in the soil it must still be frozen as there are pools of water everywhere. I’d love to get on the beds and tidy up, replace labels which have mysteriously moved but not when it’s quite so squelchy. The eastern phoebes are back (for you Brits, these are our equivalent of spotted flycatchers). They nested just outside the front door last year.

Even after all that time under the snow most of the arums, like ‘Gold Rush’,Goldrush400 are in pretty good shape and ready for a dose of liquid feed to give them an early boost in bulking up. The hellebores are budding, the plant from Edelweiss Perennials I mentioned back in December was in bud then and never quite opened before the snow. Now it’s finally opened, three months later.

On the streamside the skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, the first native to flower is peeping through. More on that soon. In the meantime, I do believe I’m going to open the window.

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