The edible onions keep attempting to bolt….they need to hold on another month or so until we can harvest them. I’m a little worried they aren’t bulbing up as much as they should be by now, but with a month or so left to go I can only hope they get their bulbing into high gear! Last year I bought a pot of chives in hopes that one day they’d find a permanent home in our herb beds. They are still biding their time at the end of the one of our vegetable beds. Out in the yard the wild onions are giving off their aroma as we walk around…

Chris grew these giant snapdragons last year and they returned this year from the roots, at least I think from the roots. The coloration of the blooms is gorgeous! A few muted maroon bluebonnets were mixed in with the blue-bluebonnets we bought. I’m still in love with the columbines blooming. I never would have thought they would have become a favorite spring flower, but they’ve proved to be a wonderful addition to the garden. The garden is almost in full foxglove mode, too. They are so striking with their height and color it is almost a disappointment we’ll have to wait two more years for them to bloom again. The…

The fig tree area of the garden is one of my favorite spots. Really, the fig tree worked out to be in the perfect location there on the side yard, fitting into the landscape perfectly. Currently there are many new plants sprouting beneath the tree, a lot of ferns, a few lilies, some different tropicals. Still biding our time for some of the tropicals to re-emerge…giving them only a few more weeks to appear before calling them toast. We’ll find something else for the spots where plants didn’t pull through. I’m ready for a balmy summer evening where I can sit out under the fig tree and read, maybe nabbing…

Back in February I wrote about the latest garden project we had going on. Well, last Sunday Chris finished it up in between mist showers by planting the azaleas we’d purchased in Nacogdoches the day before. We’d bought two native azaleas for our main flower bed from Cook’s Nursery just outside of Nacogdoches when we were there in February and kicked ourselves for not buying more. The plants were a good size and had only been $20, plus finding native azaleas can be difficult. So, since we were already in east Texas for a plant sale we went and bought five more azaleas for the back side of this perimeter…

We have quite a population of toads at our house, which is a good thing. Anywhere there’s a nook or cranny we can find a toad or two….or sometimes a whole colony as we did when we were building the beds around Chris’ man-cave. There had been a pile of wood and other miscellaneous items on one corner of the house and as we moved the debris out of the way we found a small colony of toads. We carefully carried them over to a different section of the yard where they would be able to hang out undisturbed. This little juvenile toad was hoping around the columbines as I…

Last year we planted several packets of ‘McKana’s Giant’ columbines. This year they have really put on a show for us and I’ve been very impressed with them. The columbines themselves, at least last year, went a bit dormant in the hotter part of the year, only to regrow by leaps and bounds in the last two months and send up spikes for blooming. I was pleasantly surprised with this pale blue flower when I stepped outside at lunch for one of our daily garden walk-throughs. It’s quite amazing how much we either miss or see something that changes from morning to night in the garden. Along with this hybrid…

Dividing onions about to bloom. The dogwood in full glory. A red columbine. A yellow columbine. Forget me nots….finally a mystery plant solved. They came in the seed packet we spread last year and just now bloomed. Creeping phlox from my mom. Trilliums coming up after we put them in the ground last spring. Thought they had just disappeared but they waited a year to make an appearance. An iris about to bloom. We lost one blossom that came up too early and were knocked over by the freeze so I’m glad this one decided to come up.

Last year on Sprout Dispatch I wrote about the two ‘Yellow Bird’ magnolias we planted out in the front of our yard. Unfortunately both were hit up by the deer, the bucks thought it would be cute to rub their antlers on them and thus broke some branches off of the trees. One was damaged much worse than the other and we opted to give it until spring to see if they would come back. One of them is, although a little bit shakily, but the other we thought was completely toast. At one of our local nurseries we saw a really magnificent replacement tree that would be a great…