The other day I cut a bouquet for the kitchen table: four blooms of 'Etoile de Lyon' and two palest yellow hyacinths. Notice: roses and hyacinths. This is the first time in my entire gardening career that I've seen them bloom together. I've never known a spring like this, three months of flowers crowded together into one. The flowers of 'Etoile de Lyon' were absolutely magnificent: large and full, the colors ranging from cream to golden yellow, with tints of honey and pink and fawn. They are another anomaly. Usually the beetles ruin EdL's entire spring flowering, but this year the rose fooled them by coming into bloom a month ahead of schedule. And apparently the bush, which is flourishing mightily, appreciated all the winter rain and the mild temperatures.
The garden is lush, lush, lush, and it's full of flowers. In my gardening I don't aim for blobs of color, but I do keep planting things, and it seems this year that all the flowers are making their presence felt with particular force. Violets, epimediums, chionodoxas, my one little bed of hyacinths (protected from the mice by buried metal sheeting), muscari, anemones, and a few narcissus. I have a poor record with these last, which I adore, but one old white Triandrus hybrid, 'Thalia' perhaps, is thriving in its heavy rocky damp soil, and there are patches of 'Palmares', a particular favorite, and others. The forsythia is fading now, but Mahonia aquifolium is going strong, keeping the garden well supplied with yellow, the fragrant viburns are flowering, the pears are masses of strong white in the landscape, and now the lilacs and wisteria are coming into bloom, with the tree and officinalis peonies due to begin opening shortly. And the Teas continue to flower.

"...and leave, if nought so bright may live,/All earth can take, or Heaven can give". No doubt there are greater glories than a garden in spring, but I find that this one already outruns my capacity for wonder and joy, though I enforce my attention to marvel at it.

For the last week or so I've been down in our woodland corridor clearing brush. This is a roughly 100' wide strip of woods that descends below the shade garden, with a drainage running through it. DH cleared a permanent path a year or two ago, and we got busy pulling the ivy that was tearing trees down, and then proceeded to cut and chop up the dead branches and live wild plum, ligustrum, willow, and brambles that make it such an impassable mess. The idea is to turn the corridor into a pleasure wood. It's a sweet spot once tidied, with some nice trees, and picturesque rocks. I started by clearing around a Cornelian cherry which I remembered. This is Cornus mas, one of our two native dogwoods. The commoner redtwig dogwood, C. sanguinea, is invasive and of no particular virtue; but Cornelian cherry is a beautiful large shrub or small tree, a cloud of pale yellow bloom in March, with handsome branching, and very interesting scaly-feathery bark on older specimens. The problem is that when the plants are young I can't tell the two species apart. So in my clearing I'm trying to identify the Cornelian cherries and not cut them down in mistake for redtwig dogwoods. The clearing is going slowly, but it moves forward.
Melissa