The garden of yesteryear

And by yesteryear I mean last year.

This is a snippet of the flowerbed last June. The echinacea (coneflower) was blooming, and so were the poppies that had self-seeded from the year before. (I’m hoping they come back again this year!) The spiky-looking plant on the left is a red hot poker that was just starting to bloom, I think. You can see a bit of red on it. There are two of those in the bed, although I can’t tell in this picture if you can see both of them.

To the right of the red hot poker is some self-seeded rudbeckia that wasn’t blooming yet. The year before, I planted two of those, I think, and neither one made it through the winter but tons of little fuzzy plants started popping up from the seeds, which was cool.

There’s also some marigolds in there, and the upper left is a sunflower with its giant leaves. The other side of the fence has more sunflowers, and there’s a yellow miniature rose bush in the flowerbed but not in the picture. (And pay no attention to the fact that I am terrible at weeding.)

So this is about what things will look like this summer! The echinacea is already starting to come back, the rose bush has new growth, and I’m pretty sure the little fuzzy baby rudbeckias are popping up again. I’ll keep an eye out for the poppies, and I definitely want to get some spring-blooming perennials in there this year.

A few more leftover pictures from last year:

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The crocuses are blooming, the crocuses are blooming!

Okay, to be fair these particular crocuses are no longer blooming, since this picture was taken over a week ago. But four others have bloomed since then (in a cute little row), so the title is still accurate.

(Also, while in this photo they look blueish — or is that just my computer screen? — the flowers are actually a very pretty purple.)

The story of the crocuses:

They were originally planted over a decade ago, as part of a flowerbed that was eventually overtaken by lawn again. (Probably the following year, actually.) But the crocuses persevered, and a few would pop up again every year in bright spots of purple, before the leaves were unceremoniously mowed down the first time the grass needed cutting. I intended to transplant them but never got around to it, and once the leaves were gone it was impossible to find them anyway.

Two years ago, I dug up the area around the crocuses again for a new flowerbed. After looking up how to transplant the things (and learning that they don’t have bulbs, they have corms), I divided up the corms and replanted them along the edge of the new flowerbed, and hoped they would come back the next year. They did! Last year a bunch of little green leaves sprouted up along the brick edging — and more than a few here and there in the middle of the bed, too. I’m guessing those are the ones I missed when I was digging up the bed. But, unfortunately, none of them ended up blooming; they just grew long pretty leaves.

So then I was hoping that maybe they were just storing up for next year, or something, and they would bloom next time. When these little purple guys popped up earlier this month it was super-exciting. They’re so cute and happy! Of course, the rest of the bed is still rather desolate right now, although it won’t be in a few more months. I need to look into finding some other spring-blooming plants so the crocuses won’t be so lonely next year. Or at least something with nice spring foliage.

In other news, like the crocuses, this blog has returned once more (and I promise I didn’t even think about that metaphor until I was writing this post). Let’s see if I can keep to a schedule this time! There’ll be plenty to write about as I get the garden beds going for this year, at least, and as the weather warms up maybe I’ll actually get out and go somewhere worth a post. There’s no shortage of stuff to do in Louisville in spring, that’s for sure.