2024 Virtual Garden Tour - welcome!

Kanzan today in 3pm PDT sunshine … our neighbours and I, too, think best in years

This is at our private fence line

Typical and pretty western red cedar in background

powerlines too … Kanzan had a required powerline haircut maybe a year ago - I cringed - and has made itself as beautiful as ever - a blessing indeed

the blossoms are extremely intricate and seem extra fluffy 2024

EDIT - there’s an impressive native Douglas fir in background, too

 

A sampling of the various colours of Scilla we have spread around the yard. The white and pink are obvious but what's interesting is that there's quite the variation in the shades of blue I see...
Nice to see the first evidence of flowers beginning to open on some of the Aquilegia...
And with regards to my earlier post with the hostas sporting I noticed another pot with an anomaly, this is a large variety called 'Blue Hawaii' for which I cannot find any sport or progenie. The yellow shoot is quite contrary to what one expects to see from a blue hosta, keeping my fingers crossed....
EDIT
A couple of days after the light sprout observation it struck me that the unique colouration might be due to something else altogether: ROT. And indeed, a gentle squeeze of the growth confirmed it was mush, the shoot development was aborted for some reason. Oh well, easy come, easy go....too bad, so sad...

 

Those scillas are Hyacinthoides botanically.

 

Nice to see Trillium luteum opening its flowers yesterday. Hope to see flowers on the young 'uns at the front next year. As you can see on the far left there's an ovatum flower going to its reddish phase.
To the west of these trilliums I have a Hosta 'Empress Wu' and it looks to be getting nearer its potential this year, while I have measured it I bet the leaf @3 o'clock measures darned near 13" already and its far from being past the growth stage. By the time it's fully leafed-out it'll provide a nice amount of shade for the trilliums next to it.
Couldn't resist a picture of my favourite springtime hosta, 'Dawn's Early Light'. I call it my spring beacon. It's viridescent and the yellow doesn't last much beyond the 3rd week of May so I don't have it around for too long unfortunately but it's just so cheerful when first unfurled in the spring.

 

These Lilium martagon 'Fairy Morning' are colouring up nicely, won't be long before we see them open up!
I've got blue ones, white ones and finally the pink ones are opening up. These were uprooted and transplanted late summer last year and they're not quite back to the size I'm used to seeing them at. I've isolated these to one location only at the moment but I think I'll start spreading them around.... and those martagons need a permanent spot.
There's a deciduous Azalea with had in our narrow bed between us and the neighbour's property and in the roughly 45 years it's been there it never fails to delight us with its spring colour. It's never grown to any size but it hangs in there and we welcome it back every spring. Wish I could put a cultivar name to it....

 

Thought I'd share some photos of my white-painted Hosta that is starting to open. This variegated plant changes color and by about mid-June it will be a solid dark green....believe it or not.

 

Yup, I believe it! That's par for the course with H. 'Fortunei Albopicta', I have several.

 

Today turned out to be such a beautiful day that I just had to take some photos....

IMG2311 - chameleon plant; I figure planting it in a pot in the middle of one of my water features SHOULD keep this one from spreading :)
IMG 2312 - just when you think you had devastating losses from this past winter, the sensitive ferns start to pop up.
IMG 2313 - the scent of orange blossom is starting to fill the air from the trifoliate orange.
IMG 2320 - Griffith's cobra lily - I didn't even know it had come up.
IMG 2325 - I just liked the combination - golden bells daffodil amongst the creeping phlox 'Home fires'.
IMG 2330 - mock orange 'Aztec pearl' is blooming.
IMG 2331 - I'm going to have to harvest my rhubarb soon....
IMG 2339 - ornamental strawberry 'Lipstick' and wild violets.
IMG 2347 - bluebells amongst the holly fern with a backdrop of azaleas....

 

We started off a little on the chilly side this morning but that soon faded, thank goodness. Glorious day today and I thought it would be fun to gather assorted colours of Scilla/Hyacinthoides and lay them all out for a family shot...
That's end-to-end and certainly shows all the detail but when I rolled them together to put them in the compost I immediately saw another shot.

My wife convinced me to take a quick look at our neighbour's front yard to see the lovely red tree peony that's in flower. The darned thing is HUGE, must be 7-8" across.

 

My neighbour has a couple of Wysterias and one of them is just a mass of flowers. The other not so much....

The first flowers on our Lilium martagon 'Fairy Morning'.

 

The weather has been so good lately but I haven't had time to look in on my gardens until today....

IMG_2374 - purple and green flowers of clematis 'Taiga'.
IMG_2376 - dead man's fingers aka blue bean aka blue sausage tree.
IMG_2381 - new fronds of autumn fern amongst lady and slender-crested male ferns.
IMG_2383 & 2384 - mullein; I had several white plants appear last year for the first time ever and I have no idea where they came from (they were also 3x the size*). This year the purple and pink showed up as well...
IMG_2395 - Exbury azalea hybrid 'Northern Hi-lights'.
IMG_2402 - pawpaw in full flower.
IMG_2419 - yellow-leafed clematis - I got it on clearance last year because they was no tag on the pot and everyone assumed the plant was unhealthy due to the color of the leaves....
IMG_2420 - pussy-toes.
IMG_2421 - hosta 'yellow polka dot bikini', and I have no idea why its called that...

* I have noticed that many of my plants are no where near their normal sizes this year but appear healthy, is anyone else seeing this as well?

 

'Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' is a sport of 'Striptease' and quite a few sports of it have funky names, check this out. https://myhostas.be/db/view/Striptease
The naming of sports can be a fun thing. I have a sport out of Hosta 'Fortunei Hyacinthina' which I call 'Twisting the Night Away' because it has an interesting twist to the leaves and I wanted to bless it with a name that had "twisting" in it. I separated a sport out of one my 'Striptease' plants and I'll have to put my thinking cap on as to what to call it if it stabilizes into a garden-worthy plant.

 

i clicked in link and I like the Alan Titchmarsh — touring the Hosta stump garden with our now King Ch 3 at Highgrove - now he’s a Hosta :)

that’s my dream — even a small stump for hostas

Are we allowed to vote for a sport name for your new Hosta ?

I vote for « UBC loop » which some people here may know and it has several twists literally

I invest much time at the transit place (and thank transit for such a great spot)

There is route 68 that twists around the campus & takes people past Nitobe and ubc botanical garden from same ubc loop - kind of sounds like Route 66 — one of my fav road trips in AZ

Of all names - i just bought a Hosta called

Wu La La

We shall see how the deer like it - they sure like Empress Wu

so many fun ideas

 

good morning - my fav time of cool fresh air with the « symphony in the trees » (bird singing)

the percussion crow too!
And often the eagle

@Pieter - I read this and thought it interesting to our recent virtual tour of your bluebells - the BOLD font really helps simplify (blossom all around stem vs blossom one side for example)

note the comment on link below re: hybrids


https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife/how-identify/spanish-or-native-bluebell

 

PS here is the Highgrove tour to which I refer, above

and I meant to add - i think the head gardener person in this video is from BC

 

I rather suspect the deer will like it just as much as 'Empress Wu', seeing as 'Wu-La-La' is an EW sport...

 

Another beautiful day in the city.....

IMG 2435 - wooly Dutchman's pipevine; not many leaves on the vine yet but lots of flowers this year.
IMG 2449 - lavender mountain lily aka Siberian lily
IMG 2453 - ornamental onion 'Purple Sensation'
IMG 2454 - ornamental onion 'Ivory Queen'
IMG 2459 - native prickly wild rose (this plant will take anything you throw at it and is hardy to zone 2 - got the original plants from my mother's property and since then they have aggressively multiplied).
IMG 2469 - Italian arum
IMG 2474 - have you ever seen horseradish flower? Apparently some plants never flower (this is the first time in 7 years that this plant has done so).
IMG 2482 - variegated kiwi...what's better than a green and white variegated plant with pink flowers?
IMG 2484 - native deer fern amongst the native wild ginger and oak ferns.

 

Well, bless you for posting with all the pertinent details -as most of us do if we have it- and I'm glad to have an ID as a result for an allium my neighbour gave me last year...
This is from a couple of days ago....
I got some packaged lily bulbs a couple of years ago that were supposed to Lilium langkongense. Once they had started to grow I began to have increasing doubts about the product being as labeled seeing as the leaves are whorled on the ones I have whereas LL isn't like that. Flowers were one of those 'close-but-no-cigar' things and eventually I stumbled across some pictures that identified what I was looking at: Lilium martagon 'Fairy Morning'. And while it's not what I'd bargained for it's a more than adequate substitute. It's proven to be a reliable bloomer and it readily produces offsets, what's not to like... Thus far I've only grown them in pots but with the revamp of the front bed I have a perfect spot for them so they'll get transplanted in the fall!

Another neighbour shared some Anenome coronaria with me this spring from her Costco bulk bag. Never grown them before. Seem to have a nice variety of colours, with this purple one particularly striking.

 

The lily is placed within a hybrid group rather than considered a pure form of Lilium martagon.

Lilium 'Fairy Morning' (Martagon Lily) (gardenia.net)

 

Thanks Ron! I shall revise my labeling.

 

24th May 2024 and an abundance of flowers on my Cornus kousa 'China girl' so I thought I would share with members.

 

Talking about an abundance of flowers, both our weigelas are outdoing themselves this year, particularly Weigela 'Wine and Roses'.

The other one in our backyard is unnamed, came to us many moons ago as a present and the tag that would have come with it has been lost.

With today's rain a lot of flowers have remained closed-up, like these Anenome coronaria and the Peony 'Bowl of Beauty'.

 

I am so happy to see Penstemon davidsonii blooming again after the deer got at it 3 summers ago.
That Arbutus stump you see in the picture is now really starting to disintegrate. Assuming that it was cut down when the house was built,
it's taken 50 years to get to this stage. When we moved here it was still intact - 3 feet in diameter. Must have been a beauty!

 

I don't know about anyone else, but the weeds are going crazy atm in my garden. So whilst on my hands and knees, trying to remove the stubborn ones, I came across my Hakonechloa Macra Aureola. It looked quite nice this evening, so I took a quick photo to share.
It really brightens up a shady area.

 

Unlike a lot of plants, my pink dogwood did not seem to be affected by the hard winter we had and its starting to color up now.