The best and worst of times

I have a love / hate relationship with this time of year. One sunny days it is starting to feel like spring, but there is still a very real chance of hard frosts. Some plants are starting to wake up after a hard winter, others are starting to show the real winter damage and will succumb over the next couple of mouths. So walking around the dry bed at this time of year I just hope to come out with more positives than negatives. There have been enough negatives this year and so I thought it would be nice to concentrate on the positives today.

Looking around I noticed that some of the perennials are up which is definitely a positive. Even though they have been planted for three years now, I always worry that they will not make it through to spring.  To me they signal that everything is starting to wake up and are another nudge to start buying plants. Two of my favourites are eremurus stenophyllus and aspohdelus ramosus.

Aspohdelus ramosus has a fairly upright habit with pretty white or blue star flowers.  This one seems to clump without needing any care (which is good given the lack of care I give them).  It doesn't look much yet, but I will post updates when it flowers.

Eremurus stenophyllus on the other hand is a more sprawling plant which is suppose to have good spires of yellow flowers.  It has yet to flower for me, either because it is two young,  or more likely because it needs better care than I give it. Its thin spaghetti like leaves give something different to the neat compact leaves of most of the other planting, so it keeps it place flowers or not.

Now we just need to avoid any bad frosts.