March Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day

Over the last few days, I’ve been out in the garden with my camera, trying to document all the new blooms in preparation for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day— today, the 15th of the month. It’s been a time-consuming task, but a lovely and uplifting one.
Shall we beingbegin with the hellebores, some of which I’ve already shown you? Can’t get enough of these late-winter beauties. Here we have dark,
light, and in-between These shots all required some gymnastics on the damp ground, hellebores tending to direct their blooms downward. So I was relieved to be able to stand up again for these shots of the ribes sanguineum ‘White Icicles‘ opening like so many popcorn kernels to explode into white clusters.Across the garden, this one’s cousin, the pink-flowered ribes, is a bit slower, with buds just shaking loose the yet-tight clusters.Peering down at the ground again, I spot the Brunnera macrophylla starring a bed of foliage with its blue forget-me-not flowers. You’ll have to look closely to spot them. The flower’s quite similar to the omphaloides cappadocica I posted aboutearlier, and which is also blooming right now.
A few feet over, I see a delicate yellow along the branches of the corylopsis pauciflora (Buttercup Winterhazel). As you can see, this shrub is still small, and I’m looking forward to when it’s as striking as the 6-foot one I remember seeing in bloom several springs ago at The Van Dusen Gardens in Vancouver. I know these branches don’t look like much here,

but come a bit closer and see why I love this plant so:Could anything be more springlike?

Well, perhaps these scylla, popping up like weeds — wish they’d popped up under the corylopsis — I’d love that pale yellow and bright sweet blue together. Some transplanting is in order, for sure!
Meanwhile, though, also popping up like weeds, but smelling much better than most of those, just behind the corylopsis are these lovely violets whose colour also makes a wonderful complement to the pale yellow.That pale yellow has other incarnations in the spring garden. Here it is, still very tentative, on a corydalis lutea that I was surprised to find blooming already (didn’t stop ’til almost November last year).And these primroses, offspring of transplants from my neighbour’s garden, are also beginning to bloom in that buttery shade.Not everything is yellow, however. What about this beautifully deep shade, somewhere between pink and purple — is it magenta? Over the next few weeks, this rather homely, twiggy shrub, Daphne mezereum will earn its continued place in my garden by producing gorgeous blooms and even more gorgeous fragrance.
There’s more blue in the garden, too, in the form of the cheery pulmonaria. These were brought to me years ago by my Mom and Dad who bought them at a Van Dusen fundraising sale.
Still blooming are the lonicera purpusiand the viburnum bodnatense, both of which I’ve shown you before, as well as the mahonia that I showed off for February Bloom Day and that I’ll show you a more recent shot of
And finally, allowing yellow to have the last word, I was surprised to find the senecio greyii blooming already. Perhaps because it knows I have little patience with the brassiness of its flowers and tend to snip them off to better focus on the calming grey of the foliage. I let this one stay for now. Can you spot it?

So yes, that was a big task, but a fun one, and now it’s time to get this post up and go visit some of the other Garden Bloggers’ Blooms.