Rosy Glasses of Spring

First apple blossoms on my baby tree.

The title really grabbed me:  Lost: One Pair of Rose Colored Glasses.  

This novella by fellow blogger, Amy Dingmann  (http://www.amydingmann.com), is sitting on my kitchen counter waiting for a stormy day so I'll stay out of the garden and read it.  In the mean time, I'm enjoying watching spring play with the title as I go about the garden Things I get to do today.

Dogwood's butterflies winging in the sun

Everywhere one looks Spring has displayed her optimism through rosy, pink flowers.

Cherry pompom

Love energy is pink. We are surrounded by its reassurance.  Spring has not lost her glasses.

Optimism at its best.

Welcomed Home

Callas greet with grace at the front door

Home feels good.  The welcoming committee of yard growies done good!

Blue Borage

Even though the back lawn has grown three inches too long to cut with the push mower and will be on tomorrow's Things I get to do today, all the plants and flowers got drunk on the abundant rain that fell while we were away and decided to throw a party for me.  It is glorious.

Rosemary's delicate dance

I'm wrapped in the surprise of
beauty around every corner on every plant.  I am home and I am loved.

Welcome Home!

The Whole is Greater

Pink cherry and lilac from the neighbors 

Sometimes two plus two equals five or nine or more.  When some of the parts are shared from neighbors and friends, the end result is beyond words.  So I gathered and combined flowers the other day until I was in a state of bliss. Truly the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.  But then flowers never did do the math.

Gathered from the yard

Two bunches of roses and a few accent color flowers were purchased for the arranging of Things I get to do today.  Cardoon leaves, calendula in yellow and orange,  lilly of the valley, tulips were from my yard. Pink cherry blossoms and white lilacs are from the neighbors.  What a gift!

Signs

I used to do it every year somewhere around the 21st.  The 21st sounds like spring.  My thing was that I usually started looking for signs of it around the 21st of January or the 21st of February.  By March the signs were the size of billboards so it was silly to say you were looking.  By then everybody could see it.

Raspberry sorbet in its infancy

So it was shocking to me this morning as I was sweeping and vacuuming and generally tidying up in the hen yard (hyperbole intended for those of you who may think I'm over the top on this neatness thing) that the raspberry canes were wriggling out vigorous shoots that would soon be branchlets 18" long with leaves and flowers and then soft, fat, sweet, warm berries, all this tucked into a slow motion explosion of life.

 Brunnera
  First out and last in--a full-season bloomer

A quick take around: the yard indeed looked like a billboard worthy of spring documentation.

Striped Iris

Tulip cup filled to the brim with Oregon rain

Lush moss

This is the most heady of Things I get to do today:  "page" through the leaves of my own yard "catalog" and bask in the elegant rush of life on all sides--Spring.

A dance of Delphiniums

Day Lilies