In retrospect... #2

Today I'm looking back to the gardens here at Oak Lawn in 2010. 2010 was a bit of a watershed year for the gardens as they were at their best prior to running into some disease concerns with the damp and humid conditions of 2011 which forced me into doing some garden renovating, particularly in regard to the 30 year old spruce and pine trees. With this post I want to take a look at spring in the 2010 gardens. More than any other season, spring is a time of appreciating the little details of the gardens. While surrounded above and below by some of the grandest color of the entire year, this season also bids us study and absorb some of the amazingly fine details of the natural world about us.

Spring is about minor and major bulbs of all sorts... bulbs too numerous to mention. I am still amazed that there was a time many years ago when I couldn't even grow a daffodil, not to mention getting it to bloom!

Of course by now most who read these posts know that magnolias are a huge favorite of mine...

At a time when the trees thrill us with literally thousands of blooms, it's still exciting to study the delicate fronds of a maidenhair fern advancing from the warm, moist soil.

I love looking through the fresh start of foliage on the trees, towards a garden floor strewn with an array of bulbs in bloom and perennials just poking through the soil and leaf litter... I love the sense of being in a totally natural place, planted by the wind and the rain...

One of the sure signs of spring here at Oak Lawn is the
Amelanchier canadensis coming into bloom... also known as Juneberry (the berries seldom are left alone by the birds long enough to ripen) or Shadblow because it blooms at the time the shad run in the streams, the shrub/tree is a member of the Rosacea family. It sometimes has problems with apple scab and even so, I would not be without it in the gardens.

Spring is the finest hour for the rockery as far as I am concerned. How I adore all the primulas and anemones. The colorful emerging foliage of the clump style epimediums is a thrill to see and another group of plants that I could not bear to be without. A major transplanting of my epimedium collection into a new layer of the rockery with very sharp drainage, combined with some very hot and windy weather this past season, caused my epimediums to burn back to the soil level. I am anxiously waiting to see if they have survived this humiliation, trusting that they will reemerge from growth points below the soil level, albeit with less vigor for a time than in the past... however, If they don't recover, I am fully prepared to reorder them all as I appreciate them that much... thankfully they can be delivered into June and planted, allowing me to know which have made it and which have not.

We embarked on a frightening experiment this past season, cutting daffodil foliage back to half its height a couple weeks past bloom. From there it was left until it entirely dried off. The foliage had been so vigorous the past few years that it was literally choking out the hemerocallis that grow amongst the clumps. We will know come April whether this endeavor was foolhardy or not.

I don't maintain a greenhouse year round so another thrill of spring involves my hoop house being packed with young plants. There is nothing like the fragrance of the soil warmed by the heat of the sun and the scent of all that fresh foliage and bloom...

Here then are a few more images of the spring of 2010 at Oak Lawn Cheese Factory. I will continue with the 2010 theme in my next post.

Take care,

Larry