to celebrate spring, a giveaway of my first book

Abeliophyllum distichum also called White Forsythia is more refined than traditional yellow Forsythia to which it is distantly related, both being part of the Olive family.

If gardeners are exceptional people then buy them a copy of this book for Christmas. It contains 20 stories and profiles about encounters with gardeners and a day in their life to provide reading matter for dark garden-free evenings.

For something a bit different this book on botanic art covers some of the unusual colours from black flowers, plants and seaweed like strange green, blue and puce pink.

The two best complimentary colours are Red and Green.  There are many ways this is demonstrated in the spring garden and they will be sure to draw compliments. The Peonies are just opening under a bit of shelter and shade.

Registration Link: https://secure.touchnet.net/C20569_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=3151

In springtime, the deciduous woodlands around us are beginning to awaken as the delicate flowers of spring ephemerals pierce the blanket of leaf litter. Most of these woodland plants are found in areas with rich, humusy soil and layer of deep leaf litter; they flower when the leaves are off the trees and light reaches the forest floor in spring. These diminutive plants are beautiful, but beyond this, they provide critical support for newly emerging spring bees. As temperatures warm, native solitary bees visit bloodroot, trout lily, spring beauty, Virginia bluebells, and other spring flowers to collect pollen or sip nectar. Some of these bees have a close or exclusive relationship with specific flowers, a fact recognized in their names: trout lily bee (Andrena erythronii) or the spring beauty bee(Andrena erigeniae). Trout lily bees visit more than just trout lily, but the latter relies exclusively on the pink pollen provided by spring beauty to provision their nests. However, many other bees visit this spring beauty too. In fact, 58 species of bees have been reported as visitors to this tiny pink flower. Similarly, bloodroot, trout lilies, and Virginia bluebells are visited by a diversity of bees, including bumblebees (Bombus spp.), little carpenter bees (Ceratina spp.), halictid bees (Halictus spp., Lasioglossum spp.), and mason bees (Osmia spp.). Clearly, these spring ephemerals are of considerable importance to the survival of many spring bee species, a fact we rarely consider when we admire their flowers.

Arbor Day is an opportunity to celebrate the trees that make your world better! While National Arbor Day is the last Friday in April, the first Friday in December (December 3, 2021) is South Carolina’s Arbor Day. The difference in dates is that trees in South Carolina are better able to get established when planted in the winter. According to the SC Forestry Commission, our planting season begins in December and ends in mid-March. To learn more about best practices for planting trees, see HGIC 1001, Planting Trees Correctly and HGIC, Plant a Tree.

Spring wildflowers are garden stars in the wooded area of South Carolina Botanical Garden’s Natural Heritage Trail from February to May. The spring herbaceous layer is exceptionally diverse in environments with rich soils containing lots of organic material. Every day something new appears in the landscape!

linking with Cathy of Words and Herbs new Wild and Weedy Wednesday meme

From the first time I landed on her popular blog Posie Gets Cozy, I knew there would be a connection—again, though I was the hopeless (and embarrassed) girl who hemmed her junior high school dressmaking project right onto the lap of the skirt she was wearing, and when the bell rang for next period had to go there “wearing” both.Alicia (self-portrait, left) welcomed me into her sewing circle, anyhow, charming me in the funniest Alicia-style ways. I mean, what’s not to like about a woman you don’t even know who says, “I want to be a gardener. Like Margaret.”A woman who emails you—though you are still total strangers, really—and asks you about the potato she has planted in a smallish flower pot, and how to care for it? (Answer: Get it out of the confines of that pot, a.k.a., my curriculum of How Not to Grow a Potato 101.)A woman who sends you link

AS IF IT KNOWS THAT FIREWORKS ARE CALLED FOR this weekend, the biggest old bottlebrush buckeye here, Aesculus parviflora (above), is in full bloom. Pow! A 15-foot-wide by 12-foot-tall mass of high energy, with each bloom more than a foot tall.

Each of her 150 recipes is delightfully prefaced with what amounts to its provenance: a juicy and sometimes hilarious back story that Clark tells in as simple yet deft a fashion as the style of the dish that follows. I sat right down to chapters like “Better Fried” and “It Tastes Like Chicken” and “My Mother’s Sandwich Theory of Life,” the perfect mix of a good read and a good meal.For me—a flavor-fearing kid who rinsed most of her entrees off at the sink conveniently positioned halfway between the Garland range and the family dinner table—Clark’s childhood tales are positively hair-raising: Summer vacations were spent touring France with her psychiatrist parents, gourmands determined to eat at every Michelin-starred restaurant there. Worse yet (or to Clark, more thrilling): Th