Here are some pictures.

Fava blooming yesterday

(Blooms seen from behind in this shot)  That is an ant on it. For some reason the ants have been fascinated with the favas since they were wee things.  They trek up and down them, to no apparent purpose.  I have no idea why.

One way to work with a small gardening space is to make everything closer together than recommended.  Here's an example.  Beans are sprouting amongst the base of pea plants while Aztec sweet herb winds around them and some of the hollyhocks.

Aztec sweet herb (Lippia dulcis) is something I've never grown before, or indeed even knew existed until I saw the nursery selling it this year in their effort to offer a wider variety of herbs and specialty annuals than they have in the past.  The herbs have a very pleasant sweet scent when rubbed, and I find the viney plant attractive.  At the nursery small pollinators and predators were attracted to the small button-like flowers, which I wasn't surprised about, but so far in the garden they seem to be going for more familiar food sources.  Though its leaves are, from what I've read, edible, it is apparently not much used as a sweetener any more.  I just thought it was a pretty plant, and thought it would look nice twining around the bases of the crop plants. According to what I've read so far, it was used medicinally starting in the time of the Aztecs if not before to treat various respiratory issues, but I haven't found any information on current uses, much less how to prepare it (tea? tincture? fresh? dried? etc.). Perhaps its medicinal uses have gone by the wayside like its use as a sweetener, or perhaps relevant information isn't written in English.

Yesterday while I was taking photos, there was an American Bumblebee that was obsessed with the sundial lupine blooms.

And another shot, this time of the other open bloom:

As I mentioned in a post on Wednesday, I got three sunflowers at the farmers' market this week. I planted them on Friday (the 6th) so that they wouldn't have to try to survive the then-incoming heat wave in their little peat pots.  Here is one of them, in focus in the foreground of the below shot:

Also in the shot (clockwise from the bottom left) are a bellflower (new this year), the Carolina lupine/false lupine, scallions, one of the tender salvias, sea holly, two small things in the same area (a tall verbena just starting to earn its name, and the edge of a young bean plant [I think it's a runner bean]), and the 'Butterfly Blue' delphinium that I got from the flower farm at the first farmers' market.  The farmers sure were right about it loving heat and full sun!  I'm so surprised after thinking of delphiniums as such delicate little things that need lots of coddling and still often don't even survive a year here.

The chive blooms finally opened!

California poppy bloom

The echinaceas are budding up.  Here's one (I think it's the one that I got last year that was just labelled as "white coneflower" - not sure if it's a white cultivar of Echinacea purpurea or something else) with the unusual, delicate bloom of the American alumroot (Heuchera americana) that I planted this spring.

In the foreground are foliage of a California poppy, buds of an agastache (lit by the sun), and a little hardy geranium I got at this year's historical society estate sale.

Farmers' market salad from earlier this week -

Three kinds of lettuce, spinach, radishes, baby garlic (used like scallions), red onion.  The only things not from the market were the red onion slices and the salad dressing I added after taking this picture. I love eating food fresh from the market and/or the garden.  I can often literally taste the difference!

More photos coming.

Speaking of crabapples, this is indeed the week they are blooming here, and they are as lovely as always. Here is one of the many shots I've taken of them in the area this week. This one was taken at the Charles River; you can see the river in the background, blurry.

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This is one of my favorite weeks of the year here, when suddenly there seems to be an explosion of bloom: Crabapples and cherries and lilacs and azaleas and rhododendrons and sand cherries and the late magnolias (most of the magnolias now bloom before most of the forsythia here; many forsythia are still blooming now, all leafed out, looking drab - once upon a time they bloomed in late February or early March); tulips and late daffodils and grape hyacinths and columbines and perennial candytuft and vinca and euphorbia species and moss phlox and on and on and on.  This week I saw the Catbirds for the first time this spring and today, a sure sign of summer soon to come, I heard twittering from overhead and looked up to see the Chimney Swifts swooping through the sky for the first time since early last autumn. It always feels here in this cold-winter region like spring starts out as this demure being celebrating subtlety and giving us small jewels as hints of her presence and that this is the week at which she lets down her hair and exclaims, "Let's have a big party!"

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Somehow I seem to have drawn Sundial Lupine, Lupinus perennis, to me by talking about it here recently. On Monday I stopped in at the nursery as I had to walk by it anyway, and was shocked to discover a sundial lupine for sale there (the first time I've ever seen one for sale in a nursery in person), and in one of the biggest pots I've ever seen a perennial in there. I asked the nursery manager if she thought they'd be getting more in, and she said she wouldn't guarantee it, so I bought it and took it around with me for the day. I planted it yesterday (luckily as it was shortly before I was injured). Below are a couple pictures; note how its leaves are thinner and often longer than hybrid lupines, and how they tend to be more upturned, catching the rain more easily than hybrid lupine leaves.

The manager said a lupine this big should definitely bloom this year, but we'll see.  For more on this kind of lupine, check out this link and (for subspecies occidentalis) this link. Both also have photos.

Stock, blooming away merrily

At least five or six different colors came in just the three pots I got. It's a great side effect, I think, of buying young plants before they're blooming much or at all (though I know when one has a specific color scheme in mind, it's less great). Stock smell so, so lovely, and being planted next to the honey scent of the white sweet alyssum in this year's garden, it's like an olfactory explosion in that area.

Plants waiting to be planted in the front garden

They're all natives from Toadshade. There's Nodding Onion, two Small's Penstemons, American Alumroot, Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia humifusa, which is native to the Northeast, rather than the Prickly Pear Cacti in the Southwest), Bicknell's Sedge, Rattlesnake Master (which the Native Americans in Missouri used to make sandals), Heath Aster, Hyssop-Leaved Boneset, Sundrops, Wild Smooth Petunia, and Wild Hairy Petunia.

I love sedges (Carex genus), which I feel are generally underrated plants, particularly the native varieties. Sedges are grasslike plants that often have ornamental seed heads and beautiful autumn coloration. Many of them prefer soil that has more moisture and/or more humus than even my fairly shady back garden has, but there is a native sedge for most situations, as evidenced by Bicknell's sedge (Carex bicknellii) doing well in a dry and sunny location (or a shady, moist one; it's one of the most adaptable sedges). Something else about sedges that I think is really cool, though others do not always share my enthusiasm, is that the way to tell them apart from true grasses is that sedges have triangular stems instead of circular ones. Who wouldn't like at least one triangular stem in their garden? More generally I also feel like it's important to provide some plants like these to give habitat for small critters in the garden. I've often found small spiders, for example, taking refuge in a sedge plant.

Here is a closer look at the American Alumroot (Heuchera americana) and the Prickly Pear Cactus:

It's hard to tell in this shot, but the American Alumroot already has two buds, so far looking like tiny ripening raspberries. (Those are the Small's Penstemons/Beardtongues [Penstemon smallii] on the left edge of the shot there.)

These purple and yellow violas are doing so well! The pansies are doing OK too, but not as well as the violas.

They are here shown with the foliage of dianthus plants and of Big Betony (Stachys macrantha syn. S. grandiflora syn. S. spicata), the latter being an underrated garden plant that was popular once upon a time. Though it looks closest to a salvia or upright veronica - with its glossy green scallop-edged leaves and, in late spring and/or early summer, spires of purple flowers - it is in actuality related to common garden Stachys plants such as Lamb's Ears. I believe I got this last spring from Select Seeds. Like many perennials planted into the hot, dry, windy, poor-soil slope of a front garden, it spent its first year settling in, no flowers involved. It's looking more robust this year and I'm hoping I'll see buds soon. Here is someone else's photo of a mature clump of Big Betony in flower; it looks like that picture is of 'Superba', the most common cultivar of Big Betony.

Speaking of Lamb's Ears, here's mine (Stachys byzantina 'Silver Carpet'):

It was only after I planted this, unfortunately, that I read that this cultivar, 'Silver Carpet', is prone to mildew. I'm much more tolerant of messiness in the garden than many American gardeners - I don't mind if a flowering plant gets some leaf damage, or there are aphids on the roses, or what else - but Lamb's ears is primarily or totally (depending on the cultivar) a foliage plant, and it seems rather silly to plant a foliage plant that is prone to foliar disfiguration. Ah, well. Lamb's ears is a nice plant to plant; I would recommend the plant, just not this cultivar.

After all the rain we've had (more last night/this morning), so many plants are blooming more. The orangey African daisy and the perennial candytuft and the nearby pansies are amongst them.

Something is still eating my pansy flowers and buds, most especially the pale yellow and pale blue ones in this clumping (I've only seen one bloom of that kind so far, and that one was eaten in a day!). I've never had so much damage to pansies and I cannot figure out what is going on.

Here is a close-up of the candytuft, the first decent one I've taken all spring!

That's a felicia budded in the foreground. Several of the felicias have buds, but none have bloomed yet.

Globe thistle and anise hyssop (the species, Agastache foeniculum, not the hybrid 'Blue Fortune' that I'm also growing)

The anise hyssop (left) is yet another plant that I got cheaply last spring at the estate herb sale. That sale was quite wonderful for starting a new garden. As I've said before, anise hyssop is a wonderful bee plant, one of the best I've grown. To see some photos of and a little info on this North American native, follow this link. I got the globe thistle at the farmers' market last year, but I planted it in summer and it reacted to the humid heat by dropping all its flowers/buds and expending all its energy on surviving, so I can no longer remember whether I got the species Echinops ritro or the equally common Echinops bannaticus 'Blue Glow'.

In all the rain, a lot more seedlings have sprouted.  Now the fava beans/broad beans and the sweet peas have joined the garden peas.  Here are some of the seedlings:

The big-leaved seedlings on the right are the favas. The sweet peas are at the top of the picture and the garden peas are in the middle/front, in a row lengthwise with the favas. It took them so long to get going that I hope they will have time to produce/bloom before the hot weather kicks in and kills them, but, well, we'll just have to wait and see.  (That's the borage in the upper right corner.)

Here is a close-up of some favas (with peas):