I’m going to hold my breath and declare that spring is finally here!
A handful of my daffodils are blooming but it’s my Chionodoxa (Glory of the Snow) bulbs that are going crazy right now. I grow Chionodoxa luciliae and also Chionodoxa forbesii ‘Blue Giant’ and ‘Pink Giant’. The little bulbs are extremely hardy (Zones 3-8), resistant to deer and rodents and grow in sun or part-shade:
I’m especially fond of the bright, sky-blue flowers:
My blue pasque flower is also going to open any day now:
But the flowers that excited me the most when I was outside poking around the other day were the windflowers (Anemone blanda or Grecian Windflower). My shrew friend took up residence right under the spot where I planted a group of windflower bulbs, and while he was well-behaved in the fall, he went a little crazy once it got cold and plowed quite a few tunnels throughout that flowerbed. I didn’t know if any of the windflowers had survived, so I was very excited when I stumbled upon this lovely sight:
Windflowers grow 3-4″ tall with little daisy-like flowers. The foliage is ferny and the flowers are either blue, pink or white. Windflowers are hardy in Zones 5-9 and aren’t particularly long-lived (although they can naturalize), but I was able to get 50 bulbs for eight dollars, so I decided I would experiment and see if they would grow for me.
Soon the tulips will be opening and I’ll find out if the rodents are going to be vengeful again this year, or if they will at least let me snap a few photos of the blooms before the beheadings commence.