May in the Northern Hemisphere

[Maggi Young]

Wow! What a great potfull!

[Johan K.]

Wow! What a great potfull!

Specially for you Maggi.   

I have a few more. 

[HClase]

Well, I am in the Northern Hemisphere even if it's 2000 miles to the west and two months earlier here in Newfoundland.  Most of the snow finally melted and we are promised a really warm day tomorrow - 12 C, but only for a day.  It's a long time since you've heard from me, but the last three years have been tied up with moving from our acre to a condo with a few square metres of garden, and also with Leila's final illness that came to an end in November.  Now I'm trying to pick up the threads of my life again.

Most of my bulbs were left behind, but I did manage to bring a few and my spirits have been lifted by the appearance of this chance seedling from amongst a large bed of "Princess Beatrix" a few years ago.  I've named it "Phoebe" after one of my granddaughters, and it seems to be increasing well, unlike the other browner one that has fizzled out. ( I must try to find another for Imogen - luckily the new owners still allow me to dig up things!)

P.S. Sarracenia purpurea is our Provincial Flower, we occasionally get a yellow form that's quite like S. flava in flower, but the leaves are squatter.

[Maggi Young]

Johan - I am  delighted to see all these -  thank you!

[Maggi Young]

Howard - how wonderful to have you back among us once more - and bearing  news of the rather lovely 'Phoebe' too.   
We will all be wishing you luck in finding a suitable namesake for Imogen 

It cannot have been an easy time for you  with the loss of Leila - we send our best wishes to you.

The winter has been a long time in moving out for you folks -  it has turned cold and wet again here so we're wondering if it is really spring even here in Scotland.

The dogs just found a nice fat Hedgehog in the garden, so I suppose it is spring.

[astragalus]

Maggi, do you have a picture of a hedgehog?  I'm wondering how it differs from our woodchucks, which are  very nasty when cornered.

[astragalus]

Luc, what a wonderful array of plants.  Your garden must really be wonderful.

[Robert]

Eriogonum ursinum

The first seedling to bloom from Alpine County, California. From a little over 9,000 feet (2,742 meters) elevation. It is doing well in a tub - sand and lava rock mix.



Triteleia hyacinthina

Native here on the farm. Some years they come up and bloom thickly. This year there are scattered stands.

[David Nicholson]

Nice to have you back with us Howard.

[Maggi Young]

Maggi, do you have a picture of a hedgehog?  I'm wondering how it differs from our woodchucks, which are  very nasty when cornered.

  Woodchucks are rodents- and I'm aware they can be quite fierce. Hedgehogs, while equipped with good little teeth, are only a danger  in that an over enthusiastic dog can get jabbed by the spines.  The reaction of the innocent hedgehog to any interference is to roll into a ball, presenting an array of sharp spines to the assailant.  The spines do not, however, detach, as in a porcupine.  The other problem is that hedgehogs carry masses of fleas and ticks.   Have a look at this website to learn about these rather noce  creatures. They are a help in the garden, eating slugs and snails. http://www.worldlandtrust.org/education/species/european-hedgehog

They do not do damage in the garden as Fermi's Australian Echidnas do - they seem to dig and root around more than our little chaps!

[Allan Jamieson]

These are a few pics of one of my Meconopsis hybrids which just came into flower at the end of April lured into a false sense of security by warm, sunny weather and then opened up to wet, windy conditions with sharp frosts in the mornings too! I managed to grab these pictures in spite of the weather and the flowers are looking kind of battered now, luckily still got another two plants of the same form to come into flower though.

This hybrid is from a cross that I did some years ago taking pollen from Meconopsis Kingsbarns (Hybrid) and crossing that onto a good form of Meconopsis Lingholm. It was literally the last fading flower on Kingsbarns and the very first flower from Lingholm that day, luckily the cross gave a plant with the early flowering habit of Kingsbarns and a bit of the hybrid vigour of Lingholm. There were originally dozens of seedlings but from those that I have left I think I prefer this form best because of the flower form combined with the attractive leaf shape. It isn't very tall, barely knee height and some years the weather will hold it back so that it is coming into flower at the same time as the main season large flowered Meconopsis but all the same it is a pretty little thing to start off the Meconopsis season with.

I've done my best to bring the file sizes down as far as possible, which was a struggle as the originals were from a very high resolution camera, so apologies for any loss of image quality as a result of this drastic pixel pruning!

[astragalus]

Thanks, Maggi.  They look a bit like porcupines.  The woodchucks here are best left alone.  They ignore "have-a-heart" traps.  The hunter who comes here in the fall for deer will also get rid of one if he sees it.  They do carry ticks and are quite nasty to dogs.  The only problem is their multiple tunnels which will kill
a large plant almost overnight.  Since we're mostly rock here it hasn't been a major problem.

[Maggi Young]

Allan - Welcome!

Your photos of your hybrid are quite lovely. The colour is charming, I agree. 

I think if you reduce the photos to a max. width of 760 pixels to start with, you should be able to compress the file sufficiently thereafter to reach the  < 200KB limit while still having a larger picture on the screen than you have  here.

[Philip Walker]

Aquilegia laramiensis-seeded into a nearby pot
Caltha palustris

[Allan Jamieson]

Okay Maggi, here are the images resized your way, kind of convoluted this, export as jpegs from Lightroom reduced down as per your instructionsand then opened up in Photoshop saved for web, the file sizes now are tiny from what they started off as! Even a jpeg version of these files, exported from the original raw file is around 18 to 20mb each, now down to less than 50kb each.

Hopefully they will look a bit better this way!