The sun is warm, the skies are blue and oddly, we are experiencing Santa Ana winds that typically are an event that happens in the fall months in California and hearld our brush fire season. But certainly not in the springtime.
I am in my garden, writing this on my new lap top and listening to it blow though the trees with a “sigh”, gently swirling around me as I write and with it’s song, that of the birds too.
With the warmer weather we have already experienced our first rattlesnake of the season, who happened to be dozing underneath a trash barrel and as my neighbor went to pull it in from the street…there was the reptilian surprise. Needless to say, I am paying more attention to where I put my hands as I poke around in my garden, as a snake bite would certainly ruin any one’s day including mine.
The garden is flush with new bloosoms and fragrance. Just about everything in it is blooming or just starting to. I can’t begin to give a list here, as it would be too long but some of the plants that are now blooming are Woolly Blue Curls/Trichostema lanatum, Blue-eyed Grass/sisyrinchium bellum, Penstemons, including the spectabilis, all the Salvias, India mallow and also Apricot Mallow.
Some of the bulbs are just getting ready to display their flowers and the Iris’ are hinting at putting on a show, too. I have two Ceanothus otherwise know as Far Horizon and they have been blooming for the last several weeks along with the Howard McMinn manzanita. And not to be left out, the Monkey flowers/Mimulus and Coyote Mint/Mondarella villosa are blooming as well.
In the next few weeks, the garden’s display will only become better, just in time for the Republican Womens’ Club Garden tour which I am on this year. My garden is the first native plant landscape that they have featured in their tour and I know that the members will have many questions about it, since they are unfamiliar with this type of landscaping.
There are some wildflowers blooming and of course, one of them is the California Poppy and some Baby Blue Eyes. In the last month and a half I had a problem with a gopher and this dope managed to eat quite a few of the roots of the poppies, killing a number of them. So my poppies this year are a little less impressive but still make a glorous fluttery glow with their delicate orange flowers.
Spring has arrived, summer is around the corner and beauty and nature thrive in my garden.
