By Barbara Falconer Newhall
I wasn’t looking. I was at the computer all weekend with my back to the world. When I finally took a bleary look out the window on Monday morning, I saw a front yard crazy with life — poppies,
lupine, pansies, armeria, rhododendron blossoms, tiny patches of hopeful isotoma, you name it.
Later in the morning, after putting in my time at the gym, I grabbed my camera and took a closer look. There was moss rock in its rugged glory, a bumblebee attending busily to the purple lupine,
a pair of shameless moths more interested in each other than the pale yellow pansies they lit upon, and a fearless robin studying me from the shade of our now-spent camellias.
Note to self. March might be the springiest, most exuberant month in the San Francisco Bay area, what with daffodils and California poppies blooming all over the place. But May is crazy prolific . . . Next year, don’t turn your back on that front yard of yours for more than a day. You might miss the lupine spiking from a cluster the size of your fist into a stalk the size of a baseball bat. Or the robin looking for earthworms in the rotting camellia blossoms. Or the blue-eyed grass opening its eyes to the morning sun.
Of all my plants I think I love the small, modest, tucked-away rock garden plants like the geraniums, armeria and blue-eyed grass the most.
But are they really my plants? Jillian the gardener planted them and fed them, and then they grew themselves. But I wanted them, and I love them, so I’m claiming them.
More meditations on nature at “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder — But What If There’s No Beholder” and “Yosemite Rocks — And Sometimes It Rolls.”
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Love your pictures and site send me updates if you will.
Thanks
Gage
Hi Gage, I’d love to send you my updates. Just put your email address in the box in the upper right hand corner of my blog and click submit! Thanks, Barbara
beautiful photos, Barbara! glad to see the garden is doing beautifully 🙂
–Jillian the gardener
May 10 and my riot of California poppies in the front yard are finished for this year as are the apricot and royal purple Dutch irises, but the yarrow and geraniums and all the sages are blooming. And the roses’ first bloom is dazzling and so far no aphids, or mildew or black spot or rust. Late March until now is spring here, but I think we are a little warmer that you. Aren’t gardens a joy? I’m going out now to cut the faded roses. Your photos are beautiful. Dee
Dee, I’m just back from Abbotts Lagoon, a foggy, windy place at Point Reyes — and the California poppies are just now in bloom there. Two weeks ago the yellow bush lupine was in full bloom at Chimney Rock, also in Point Reyes, but today it was budding out at the Lagoon — which was looking pretty dark, chilly and lagoony today.