Six on Saturday – 09/05/2020 – frost and other surprises

It’s been a sunny but chilly week. So chilly, in fact, that we woke yesterday to a touch of frost, while areas not too far north of here had snow – deep enough to shovel! This isn’t surprising given our normal last frost date is closer to the last week of May than the first week. Nothing was harmed in the garden, and the frost made for some quite lovely photos. It features, for example, in this first of today’s Six things in my garden. (Feel free to visit The Propagator‘s site to see other Sixes from all over the place.)

1 – Frost dipped Vinca minor

2 – These are emerging Canada Mayapple – Podophyllum peltatum. When fully open this is a large, low leaf that looks like an umbrella, sort of. Very cool to see them come out of the ground like this.

3 – Apparently ‘stump gardens’ are the latest garden design rage. Take a hollowed out tree stump, fill it with dirt and plant something in it. OK. Here’s a stump from a large basswood that was cut last year along our street front; it was cut because it was rotting so the hollow was there. I dug up some Christmas Ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides, an evergreen native fern I had growing in the back woodland garden area) and plunked them in the stump hollow. I hope they’ll live through the summer (with watering, I imagine) and I’m curious to see if they’ll survive the winter.

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4 – White Trout Lily – Erythronium albidum – grows amongst the more common yellow trout lily throughout the wooded areas on the property. It’s a native spring ephemeral and forms huge colonies via creeping underground stolons.

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5 – Fritillaria meleagris – Checkered Lily – Usually this small spring bulb has its blossom pointed firmly to the ground, making it difficult to get a good shot of its innards. I spotted this one yesterday afternoon, growing in the unmowed grass in the back field. The depth of field is too shallow to make this a very good photo, but I love how the late afternoon sun is coming through the petals, like it was stained glass.

Chipmunks are EVERYWHERE this spring! They seem to be getting used to me working from home, popping out into the garden at all hours of the day. This was not taken with a telephoto lens – I just happened to be walking through the side garden and heard a rustling. This little one looked at me for a long while while I snapped away, before it scurried into its burrow in the stone wall.

I hope all the mothers reading this have a lovely Mother’s Day tomorrow. Stay safe everyone.