More April in the Garden

 This is one of the thrifts on the front little rockery.  A very good plant, but I should replace them when they get older and start to fall apart.  There are quite a few more choice alpines in this area.  This is the season for them.  Hope to get out and weed the area, soon.

 The white hellebores are spreading into a large clump under the deck.  They are easy to keep in check, though.  Here you see some of the moss garden.. it too, needs to be cleaned up.  The moss is spreading quite nicely.

 This combination of the corsican hellebore and the fern leafed peony is excellent.  It sits in front of the west coast planter.  Both plants bloom at the same time.  The surrounding alpines are thriving under this deciduous tree that leafs out late... all in clay with leaves falling on them in the Autumn.. everything alpines do not like.  :-))

 This is not a great photo of the dark hellebore by the back steps.  The primulas are in front of it and the rhodos.  The ferns and things under the rhodos need to be weeded and thinned out too.

 This is one of the photos of the heavy traffic on the Yangtze.  They seem to grow canola in every available bit of ground.  There was actually a lot of smog and the sky was not quite this blue.  It hurts my eyes just to look at the real smog in the photos, so I gave them a bit more blue sky using exposure adjustment in photoshop. 

This is one of a few more photos I managed to get processed from our trip to Carlsbad Caverns in 2007.  Amazing place. 

I was out to the garden for a few minutes.  I got a bit of weeding done.  I was so pleased, yesterday, to find that one of my trilliums in the woodland area has come up.  The leaves look a bit ragged.  I wait for the other one.  One of these trilliums had 2 huge blooms last year, and now I have this pitiful showing, this year.  The little one at the front is almost finished.  It is turned red.  It has 2 flowers this year. 

We had a salad with a few leaves of the swiss chard, some dandilion leaves, chives, lemon balm, sage, and then the pecan halves, strawberries and feta cheese with balsamic vinegrette.  Was surprisingly good.  I made a rhubarb and strawberry pie.  The rhubarb has nice big leaves this year, but the stems are still pathetic.  I did manage to get a cup and a quarter of rhubarb for the pie; which is really very good.

I am slowly getting over this cold, but seem to be sleeping a lot. 
The last report I had from my site meter reader says I had an average last week, of 99 hits a day!  Many google bot views..presumably in response to searches.
Looking for the place to add tags... guess they are now called labels.. ok, fine, that works, I think.