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Suzy Bales' Thoughts on the Entries:
So many thoughtful entries and so many good ideas! It is the golden garden circle, repeated in each entry—you cheer up your garden, enlivening it with plants and it cheers you.
Renee Fitzgerald has the right idea. Anticipation and planning ahead are the joys of gardening. Hellebore flowers, depending on which variety you bought can open white, pink or purple, be freckled or spotted. What looks like flower petals are really bracts and they fade over the three or four months of bloom to a wonderful lime green. In the center of the bracts a lime-green seed pod forms. Make sure you look under the skirts of the mother next year for seedlings, a gift that keeps giving.
All of the entries were winners in their own way. Since I could only chose one, I chose Pauline Mucciaccio’s love of the humble crocus. It really gets to the heart of what I love about gardening. The plants are an example to us all. They routinely brave ice storms, blizzards, blankets of snow, high winds, gray days and quickly plunging temperatures. They cost very little, are small as buttons, slip into the soil without much effort and reliably return to cheer us each year. Who could resist? I don’t understand how there can be gardens without them. Planting any of the early blooming bulbs, snowdrops, winter aconite, dwarf iris and crocus is as close to a sure thing as a gardener ever gets.
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The Winning Entry by Pauline Mucciaccio
This is a hard question for me, since I have so many favorites. Is it the majestic Weeping Willow tree, or the beautiful maple & oak trees that dazzle me with their brilliant colors every fall, or is it that first red ripe, juicy tomato of the summer? Actually, if I had to chose my favorite it would be the crocus. By the time winter is almost over, but it's still too early to garden, there in the garden under a light blanket of snow is the hint that spring will soon be here. I see my crocuses, ever so slightly starting to show the first signs of getting ready to bloom. I love these plants, because they come in so many different sizes and colors, some with stripes, multi-color, or solid colors. Yet even though they maybe small they are the strongest flowers blooming when everything is against their survival, frigid soil, and temperatures barely above freezing. True there maybe grander flowers than the crocus, but the crocus will always remain my absolute favorite flower, because still with snow on the ground, these warriors, break winters last frozen grip on my garden to announce...Spring is on it's way! You can read all of the entries here.
3 comments:
Congratulations to the winner and thank you for the lilac tips!
OK, crocus is my new favorite too. Dangit.
-Renee
That was great Andrew. My congratulations too to the lucky book recipient!
I have used the Digitalis grandiflorus in other peoples' gardens but not in mine ... that's odd. I wonder why not in mine... I'll have to change that. It's actually quite hard to find around here, though, so I'll have to jump on it when I do find it next.
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