The first thing to stop me in my tracks were these trilliums. A smattering of them were sprinkled across the forest floor, with many more just emerging. I will have to go back in a week or so. You can see how here at the forest’s edge they are pushing through a carpet of English ivy. We have been hacking away at the ivy, with the help of neighbors, but it is persistent stuff, and has nearly strangled some magnificent trees.

As we dive deeper into the woods, the ivy and blackberries give way to natives like these fiddleheads. They are said to be a culinary delicacy, but the one time I ordered them in a restaurant they were a feast for the eyes, but just so so on the tongue. I would rather leave them in the woods where they arguably belong.

Patches of oxalis are just beginning to produce flowers, not that they depend on floral display for their charm.

Working our way to the bottom of the ravine, things begin to get boggy. This was one of only two skunk cabbage to come early to the party, but already our noses alerted us to their presence. There will be lots of them later on, so stand back.

Here is one of three itty bitty streams (or are they creeks?) that converge at the bottom and then empty into a small lake out by the main road. The whole area is boggy now. I jumped across the creek and went in to my knees…glad there was a hiking buddy to pull me out.

Love these patches of native Mahonia.

I leave you with the oddity of the day: a tree growing out of the stump of one of its ancestors. Can you see the roots embracing the sides of the stump? Always something new to see out there. Thanks for coming along.

After a short introduction, during which it was impressed upon us the importance of caring for our tools (I was already behind the eight ball with that one, how about you?), we decamped to a Japanese maple. It looked quite beautiful to me…kind of an umbrella effect with a complete lacework canopy of branchlets. The picture above was taken about two thirds of the way through the process. It was brutal. It was, however, highly informative, as we were taken through the complete process, with our guide thinking out loud and conveying his strategy for each and every cut. First, he cut out all the dead wood. With that out of the way, it became easier to see the structure. Where branches rubbed against one another, decisions had to be made: which one would go? Sometimes the choice was surprising, until we learned of how it fit into the overall vision for the tree. In the end, the volume was taken back by about half. I began to see it less as butchery and more as a slow and careful artistic endeavor: the sculptor revealing the essence of the artwork. This particular tree is valued at around $3000.00 (insert Antiques Roadshow-ish gasp of disbelief here)

We had spent nearly an hour on the maple, so the rest of the session consisted of a walk around the grounds with questions and answers. A memorable stop along the route was this juniper, left to its own devices.

And its once identical twin after a haircut. The tonsured twin is less likely to lose limbs in extreme weather, and clean cuts have replaced any damaged areas where disease would be likely to gain a foothold. This guy has a windswept, coastal persona that is appealing, but I am still partial to his shaggier sibling (just a matter of taste: Jeff Bridges over Alec Baldwin any time).

I guess there will still be the push-pull of different perspectives in our garden. I may have lost all credibility in my quest for the “natural” look, but I can hardly complain. Most of our property is untouched deep woods. Tomorrow I will take you on another walk on the wild side.

Moving into a different house, most will agree, can be a daunting task. More so, if the house is a remodeling project in a borderline area (it would be a stretch to call it a “neighborhood”, surrounded as it was by warehouses and freeways). In my first act of gardening, I brought home a shovelful of common violets (Viola odorata) from my mom’s and slipped them into an unobtrusive spot by the front porch. Truth be known, all spots were pretty unobtrusive at the time, but that’s another story. My intent was fuzzy, just some knee-jerk reaction to a nesting instinct. My ignorance was vast. I had never heard of such a thing as an invasive plant. Over time, more and more of the rubble-strewn lot gave way to cultivation. At weeding time, I would find errant violets popping up in each and every bed, duly yanking them out and casting them aside with some annoyance. The violets had other ideas. In late February, I ventured into the waterlogged garden to admire the daffodils at close range. Confronted by a carpet of fragrant purple, punctuated here and there by the nodding yellow and white blossoms of the daffys, it became clear that the violets had it right after all.

Then I remembered a failed baking project from some years back. It was a birthday cake. It fell. There was no time to bake another, but this sorry-looking brown lump with the crater in the middle simply would not do. Filling the crater with lemon curd helped some, but embellishment of some kind was definitely in order. Off I went to the gourmet deli for some candied violets. Yikes! Semi-precious gems fall roughly into the same price range! I would have to make do with a few primroses dusted with sugar and some sprigs of ivy. The cake was lovely in the end.

The yen for candied violets resurfaced with vigor when I saw before me the raw materials in ridiculous abundance. After some trial and error, here is the process I devised. Pick about 2 cups of violets with stems attached. Fill a large bowl with cold water. Dump in the violets and swish them around to eliminate mud and/or critters, then pat them dry with paper towels. Whisk two egg whites in a bowl until barely frothy. Mound granulated sugar in a pie pan. Cover a cookie sheet with parchment or wax paper. Have handy a teaspoon, a pair of scissors and a damp sponge. Hold a violet by its stem, swish it around in the egg white, tap it against the side of the bowl to remove excess, then lay it in the sugar and use the spoon to fill all of the little crevices. Shake off extra sugar, lay the sugarcoated violet onto the parchment and use the scissors to cut off the stem. The sugar will puddle a little, so the best effect will be achieved if you place the flower face up. The damp sponge comes in handy to wipe sticky fingers and scissors from time to time. My two cups of violets filled a large baking sheet with no two violets touching. Drying time, I found, is critical. In a few hours they are dry enough to use for decorating, but for storage, a few days is more like it. My first batch seemed perfectly dry the next day, so I put them in little jars on a shelf, where I could admire them. Oops! They congealed into a solid ball. It was possible to pry them apart, but not without causing considerable damage (broken bits make a lovely flavoring for homemade ice cream, scones or biscotti). I used superfine sugar for the second batch. The color comes through a little better and they are more delicate, but drying time is even longer.

In the end, what is there to show for the considerable effort? The deep purple of the flower is filtered through the sugary, translucent crust to become a pale, shimmering lilac with just a glimpse of the orange eye showing through. The taste is hauntingly unexpected and elusive: as if your senses got all mixed up and you are suddenly tasting with your olfactory glands.

This is no quickie project. My love discovered me amidst the violets and proclaimed me certifiably insane. Unable to argue with such an astute assessment of my mental state, I simply turned the music up a notch and continued dipping and snipping and dreaming of extraordinary concoctions to come.

I mostly wear gloves, but when it comes to delicate weeding chores, nothing beats a bare-fisted, probing fingers approach. The garden ends up looking great, but don’t look at my favorite gardening tools too closely.

Enter Bag Balm, in the distinctive green tin with the cow’s head wreathed in flowers on the lid, and a discreet illustration of an udder and teats on the side. It is almost pure lanolin, and sticky feeling when you first slather it on. It absorbs fairly quickly, but even so, I only use it at bedtime to avoid mucking up anything I might touch. Having tried dozens of products over the years, I will say that this is the only one that really works. I buy it at our local feed and seed, but recently spotted it on the shelves of a one stop shopping center in town. Guess the word is getting out. Rest assured that no cows bribed me to write this post. I do so as a public service to fellow sufferers of cracked cuticles and callused paws.

James, over at Lost in the Landscape posted recently about the skeletal remains of leaves. His photos were sublime…mine, not so much. I have never been able to resist bringing all sorts of bits and pieces home from my walks. Bins, baskets and boxes in my workroom are filled with things like lichens, mosses, cones, pods and the like. I think I must be descended, not from apes, but from rats and squirrels. But I digress. The leaves here are from Epimedium ‘Lilafree’ after having been left on the ground through the winter. The Physalis, or Japanese lanterns, are appealing enough when they are papery and brilliant orange, but after weathering all that winter can throw at them, they are reduced to a delicate tracery of veins enclosing bright red berries at their hearts. The fragility of this booty precludes hoarding it, which somehow makes it all the more precious.

This is what all of the trees in the orchard looked like a few weeks ago.

While I tend to throw myself at the garden in fits and starts, Richard is pretty good at pacing himself. A couple of hours a day, and pretty soon…

their haircuts complete, the trees are ready for prime time.

With a bonus of plenty of twigs to bring inside and force into bloom. These are pear blossoms that have been in a sunny spot in a vase with water for two weeks.

As you can see in this closeup, some blossoms have fully opened, while others are still coming on. I am partial to the little ball shapes before they unfold.

The cherry trees were a bigger project, requiring some engineering and using ropes as pullies to keep big, heavy limbs from falling on cats or humans. This stash of limbs and branches leads to fantasies of rustic structures.

Here’s a bucket of cherry branches sitting in water, waiting for the sunlight to work its magic and coax them into bloom. If you lived nearby, a big bouquet of these would be yours for the asking.

Our first year here, we were intimidated by the orchard and hired a neighbor/arborist to do the work for us. We paid attention while he lopped and lectured. Like so many things horticultural, timing is everything. Get that right (in general, because even there quite a bit of leeway exists) and the rest is just a matter of putting in the time. With days like we have been having lately, it is pure pleasure to be out there ‘playing’ in the sunshine.

I may have been too hasty, last spring, in declaring my newly planted Callistemon ‘Clemson’ dead. I cut it back hard, and it sent up new shoots from the base, but never produced the red bottle brush blossoms I so eagerly anticipated. Look at the above photo. Do you see what I see? I could swear there are signs of life, in the form of swelling nodes. Hands off this time. We’ll see what happens. It really should be hardy, as I have seen healthy specimens in the Reed ‘Hell Strip’. Fingers crossed.

Mahonia ‘Arthur Menzies’ knocked my socks off when I first saw it (in bloom). This one has been here for three years, the last two of which it formed long racemes of buds which were wiped out by bad weather. I don’t really mind, because the foliage looks like this all year. The ones at Cistus are 6′ tall, so it will only get better.

I keep adding heathers, but am not very good at keeping track of their names. This anonymous one snuggles up to Chamaecyparis ‘Barry’s Silver’.

In that same bed, the new foliage is showing up on the Rhus. I love the light, airy look and pale color at this stage.

Nothing seems to phase the Heucheras. They come through snows and deep freezes looking like this, and even seed around a bit. Think I’ll ever spot a sport to add to the growing horde?

The ‘Thunderhead’ pine is just a kid, but one of these days it will have started to sprawl and put forth the huge candles that attracted me to it in the first place.

Over in the vegetable patch, the rhubarb is beginning to push through the leafy mulch. See how crinkly and fresh the soon-to-be-huge leaves are at first.

Well, that was fun! Feel free to join in if you are a fellow foliage fancier. The more the merrier!

I seem to detect a note of desperation in the search for blossoms among bloggers this month. These snowdrops are singing their swan song, and like anything that’s been around for a while, one must get down on all fours to appreciate them (unless, I guess, you have great drifts of them…i do not).

The violets are just beginning. This is the commonest, and my favorite scent: Viola odorata, a shovelful of which came to my garden from my mom’s many years ago and has claimed space in every shady nook and cranny in two subsequent gardens.

Out under the sweetheart trees (see yesterday’s post) a carpet of white violets went unnoticed by me until joining in Carol’s Bloom Day project. Thanks again to Carol for opening eyes to hidden treasures.

They are sparse now, but soon there will be swathes of them. Here, again, it was necessary to get down for a worm’s eye view. Am I soggy and muddy? Guess. Was it worth it? You bet!

Still crawling around to get this shot of ‘Diane’. She has put on nice spurts of new growth each year, so I think by next year she will be tall enough to make a real impression on her own, without the camera tricks for giving a starlet presence.

About the time my back threatened to revolt over the permanent stoop, here came Euphorbia wulfenii doing its thing right at eye level. It is still getting into character before straightening up and unfurling its full glory, but I like it almost best at this stage…so full of promise…very like February itself.

Here’s my sweetheart in front of our “sweetheart trees”. We call them that because they have been standing there together long enough to grow that tall. Richard is 6′3″, so the trees are mighty tall indeed. When I mentioned, in a previous post, the logging that had gone on here, Jo asked if there were still big trees standing. Oh, yes.

I could point my camera in any direction and get a shot like this. Hemlock, Fir and Cedar, mainly, with Alder and Maple taking over in the logged areas (we’re hoping these will eventually shade out the dreaded blackberries)…living proof that nature abhors a vacuum.