Grapefruit Flowers at Longwood Gardens

Grapefruit flowers at Longwood Gardens. They smell delicious.

Spring daffodils and other flower portents of Spring

I like these daffodils with the two colors.

These yellow daffodils are tinier and more delicate in appearance.

These interesting shoots will hopefully be glorious peonies in a month or so.

Toad Lily on the Shellpot Creek

I thought I had lost this toad lily twice this year due to Shellpot Creek flooding and overflowing its banks. It seems to have done just fine and has some pretty wildly spotted flowers.

Cool insects on the Joe Pye Weed

The Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) is tall and flowering and was attracting butterflies, bees and spiders the other day (click photos for larger).

The butterfly is an Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), though I didn't get him to pose to show the swallowtail better. It is the state butterfly of Delaware.


The bee.

And a very interesting, but shy and hard to photograph bright yellow spider.


If you know what kind of spider this is please post in the comments.

Lily of the Valley on the Shellpot Creek

We are completing our third year at this house and yet I am still finding interesting things and discovering plants that I didn't know were here.

These lily of the valley are right on the edge of the yard next to the creek almost growing from under some rocks there. I do not recall seeing them before, so I got in close to record them.

They are supposed to have a wonderful smell, but I couldn't really get in close enough to smell them. These are native to the Eastern US, but there is some debate about this. Examination of the details shows that they are not necessarily native to Delaware. I guess we can assume they were planted there by someone.

Irises finally!

I try to have irises at each of the places I have lived. I had a great set at my house in Wilmington, and we have tried repeatedly to grow some at this house, with a startling lack of success until this year.

One set that is finally blooming at the end of the driveway was to replace two other attempts that yielded leaves and then nothing the next year. Then we waited one leaf-only year for this one to produce a ton of iris flowers, some of which are on stalks almost four feet tall. I wish I knew what caused the success, perhaps it is just patience.

We planted another set closer to the house. These irises are not as tall, but are as bountiful with blooms.



I never realized until taking these closeup pictures that an iris "flower" appears to made of three flowers in a triangle, and that the center of the triangle is not the flower part, it is the fuzzy triangle corners that have the important flower "parts" so to speak. My amateur naturalism and horticulture are starting to pay dividends with new knowledge for me.

Gladiator Alliums

Each house I live in I try to grow Gladiator Alliums because they are so tall and spherical and because I can shout "Maximus" at them just like in the film.

Even since these pictures were taken last week, these alliums have gotten taller and the flowers large in diameter.


The bulbs for these plants missed last November's planting date, so we put them in as soon as we could in February of this year. It seems to have done them no harm. Let's see what happens next year.

Spring Beauty

In the spring, we often get many clumps of delicate white flowers with pink lines on them. They are very tiny, and pretty enough that I tend to mow around them on the first fews mows of the spring.

After much research, I have finally found out that these flowers are called Spring Beauty, Claytonia virginica, and are native to the area. Thus they are not weeds and will get accorded great respect each year when they arrive.

The peak of the Cherry Trees

This line of Cherry Trees on Weldin road at Immaculate Heart of Mary was at peak bloom the week after Easter. There is another line down Shellburne Road in the Shellburne development though I have no pictures of them. The Shellburne cherry trees are old and suffering, the flowers look great but the tree limbs are falling down. The ones at the church look fantastic.

So good you could almost eat them.

It is a tunnel when you walk under them.

The close ups should give you some idea of the denseness and almost oppressive richness of the close packed blooms. Unfortunately I think scent is traded for looks for these types of plants. Linus liked them though.

Remembering the Daffodils of Early Spring

Yellow centers on white background daffodils. These pictures are from a week or two ago when the daffodils were blooming with all their might. Many have since done their duty, and the flowers are done.

These salmon colored daffodils centers coincidentally match the giant terra cotta pots on the porch. Click on the pictures for a more intense closeup.

Magnolias at the Dupont Country Club

Just a little earlier this spring I was being overwhelmed with the wonderful fragrance of all of the magnolias that were blooming in all of the neighborhoods of Delaware. Most have finally reached their peak and moved on, but I tool some closeup pictures of some flowers on a tree at the DuPont Country Club while it was at its best.

Stick your nose in there and smell the flower in this closeup. I can almost remember the smell just by looking at it. The petals feel really smooth as well.

The flowers of spring

Some flowers of Spring arrive even before the Spring. Just a few days of nice weather and the snow is gone and the earliest flowers are starting to bloom.

The snow drops were first.


Then came the crocuses.




The other bulbs have sprouted and have green on them. More flowers will arrive soon.

Orange daylilies finally bloom

This very traditional orange daylily finally bloomed after almost 3 years of us being at this house from a clump that is near the creek.

I suppose they were either planted just before we got there and needed some time to grow to flowering stage. The other variable that changed in this uncontrolled experiment is that some of the trees on our side and on the other side of the creek that were shading this clump and others by the creek have fallen down and been removed. Thus it is sunnier in these locations than before.

The only reason I want to know what finally got them to bloom is I may want to encourage these plants in the future and need to duplicate the conditions. Time means just wait, but sun means choose the planting location carefully. Are there any experts out there with an explanation?

Screaming Yellow

These perennials are called Screaming Yellow. They are Baptisia sphaerocarpa.



Planted last year, they are doing well this year. Supposedly they do poorly in the year they are planted but then perk up as shown. We are big perennial fans for the simple reason that you don't have to plant them each year, and many of them look great.

Late Spring Flowers - Peonies smell so good

I wish there was a Sniffr(tm) just like Flickr where you could upload the smell of something. These peonies smell even better than they look. You will just have to go outside and smell your own or just imagine as you look at these pictures.


The ants love them


Three in a row.

Spring flowers bring out the bleeding hearts, and others

Spring flowers for a rainy day.

I thought I would take pictures of these tulips before they even bloom since the squirrels will soon whack the heads off of them one by one.

A hyacinth closeup looking dizzyingly downward.

The squirrels don't bother the white tulips. These are in a different part of the yard. This photo is peering down the center of a fully open flower.


These daffodils are doing even better this year than last.


The grape hyacinths are blooming from the top down so the tops look lighter, but the bottoms really look like grapes.

This bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis) has come back year after year even with neglectful treatment. So far it has only one flower on it.