What Happened To Spring?

The skies are a dreary gray, and it’s in the 50’s.  So what happened to our nice spring weather?

Still, I know it must be springtime, because all those wonderful spring flowers are blooming.  I saw some bluebells earlier this month.

I’ve never seen any in our woods here, but I planted some in one of our shady flowerbeds.  They’re properly called Mertensia virginica, or Virginia Bluebells.

Not far from them, the Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum commutatum) started blooming a couple of weeks later.

They’re still going strong, although the Bluebells have pretty much died off.

However, the Lenten Rose (Helleborus Royal Heritage Strain)  is still blooming like crazy.

It blooms for a long time!

And I know it must be spring, because the dogwood trees in the woods are blooming, and the little ones in our front yard have a few blooms, too.

We have a white one and this red one, a Cherokee Chief variety.

In the front flower beds, there are azaleas budding out, clematis starting to grow, plus “wild” geraniums, iris and beebalm.  There’s also a little white flower formally known as Anemone pulsatilla, but also known as Pasque Flower, Wind Flower, Meadow Anemone, Passe Flower and Easter Flower.

I can understand why it’s called Easter Flower since in bloomed at just the right time for Easter.

The Bugleweed (Ajuga reptans) is also full of blooms, with one of the many hostas growing up through it.

Of course, this is a just a smattering of the flowers blooming around here.  It’s one thing I’ve had a hard time getting used to living here in the south – all the flowers just seem to bloom at once instead of a succession of blooms.

Okay, they don’t really ALL bloom at the same time, but to have iris and azalea and dogwoods and Lenten roses all blooming at the same time just seems a little strange to me.  There was more of a sequence where I grew up.

At any rate, the flowers are blooming, so even if it’s cold and dreary outside, it must really still be spring!

Southern Voodoo

A while back I got an email from the garden Writer, Penny Carnathan, at The Tampa Tribune.  She was putting together an article for Halloween with different “scary” plants.  She saw my blog entry, Voodoo Magic, from last June with pictures of the Voodoo Lilies growing near our pond and told me she wanted “a nice image of a voodoo lily bloom, and you’ve got about the best I’ve seen.”  Cool!

The article was published October 26, 2008, in The Tampa Tribune with one of the pictures I took of the Voodoo Lilies here, plus some other really neat pictures of other strange plants.

It was also published in “Tampa Bay Online” in an article titled With Faces Like These, Who Needs Costumes?   Unfortunately, they didn’t put the pictures online, which sort of amazes me.  Seems like that would be an even better place to have them.

I wish I’d been able to get a copy of that Tampa Tribune with the article, but had to make do with seeing the .pdf file of the article for the paper.  Too bad I can’t publish that online, as it has such great pics.

Penny did a great job though.  It was an interesting article, and I’m sure the Tampa Tribune is lucky to have her writing for them!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you’d like to try growing Voodoo Lily plants, you might try one of these!

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Voodoo Magic

There’s a bit of Voodoo at our house right now. Specifically, the Voodoo Lily out by the pond is blooming.

It’s scientifically known as Dracunculus vulgaris (aka Arum dracunculus). Some of the common names are Dragon Arum, Ragons, Snake Lily, Black Arum, Black Dragon, Dragonwort, & Stink Lily. In Greece it is called Drakondia, with the dragon being the long spadex inside the enormous maroon-lipped spathe.

There is also at least one plant nursery that has dubbed it “The Viagra Lily” for obvious reasons.

When we first moved here, there was a whole colony of these plants on the hillside above the spring feeding our pond. Unfortunately, when the guys dug out the pond we lost a lot of them. It will take a while for the colony to rebuild. The plant spreads by tubers underground, and spreading seeds above ground.

It’s an interesting plant. Way up there on the cool-o-meter! Not only is it funky looking, but it’s a thermogenic plant! The first day or so it’s in bloom, the flower produces heat. I suppose that’s to help carry the stink. Yeah, for a short period the plant also rates high on the yuck-o-meter.

It smells like something that died a long time ago. The Voodoo Lily uses the carrion smell to attract insects that like dead stuff, like flies, for pollination. You can see in this video the smell works very well at attracting flies.

Fortunately the smell doesn’t last long, but all kinds of bugs seem to love it.

The flower (spathe) on this plant is a couple feet across. The shimmering purple-black “jack” supposedly can grow to as long as fifty inches. This one has a ways to go before it reaches that size, being only a little over 23 inches long from the base down in the throat of the flower, to the tip. It really is a neat plant. Just don’t breath deep the first day it’s blooming!

Paul’s Himalayan Musk Rose

Paul’s a rambler. No, not a rambling man, a rambling rose that was named after the guy who hybridized it and registered it in 1916. It’s got a light pink double bloom, lots of thorns, resistant to most rose diseases, and fragrant. (What’s a rose without the rose smell?)
I first became enamored of these tall growing roses when I was a very young newlywed, working night shift at the hospital where my husband spent part of his days in training as a Physician’s Assistant. We had rented and moved out to this little farm, and in the front yard one of these rambling roses was growing way up in the tree. WAY up.

It only puts on a real show of bloom once a year, in the late spring or early summer. But oh! What a sight when you can look high up in a tree and see it full of rose blooms!

Mine isn’t as full or so far up yet as that first one I ever saw, but it’s working on it. I planted it beside a huge oak tree at the front right corner of our yard, alongside the driveway. Every once in a while The Farmer has to get a tall ladder and push a few of the straggling branches over a tree limb. He hasn’t done it this year because his ladder got too short for the height of the rose.