A Beautiful Day in the Garden

Day 53

The Daily DuBrule

Rose 'Moje Hammarberg' got a good cleaning out and cutting back today

What a magnificent day. Warm, sunny, spring-like. A flock of robins flitted about on my front lawn and as they pulled worms out of the ground all I could think was "thank God I don't use poisons on my lawn". I spent the day doing more cutting back in the garden. Silly me, I thought I was done with that but I just keep finding more stuff I missed.

Top of the list were some summer blooming shrubs that bloom on new wood. It's really important to cut them back in the spring. This encourages lots of new, young growth which is where all the flower bud action happens. Some plants I worked on today:

Leptodermis oblonga, which only grows 3-4' tall and has tubular lavender purple blossoms in July and August.
 
Symphoricarpos albus, also called snowberry, an old fashioned shrub that flowers in August and gets big fleshy white berries in the fall.

Cephalanthus or buttonbush, a late summer bloomer with white round orbs of flowers that the butterflies love.

Clerodendrum trichotomum, the glory bower shrub, with fragrant white fall flowers followed by stunning seed pods. 

Finally, I cut all my pussywillows. I am going to bunch them and bring them into Natureworks to sell. Every year it is important to really prune pussywillow shrubs hard. This gets rid of the old wood and encourages tons of young, new wood which has the best pussywillow catkins the following winter. I got out my father's pruning saw and had at it, cutting out tons of dead branches and doing some major cuts, really shaping the shrubs. Quite a harvest of pussywillow branches for a beautiful day in March. 

I watched bugs hatching and flitting through the air. I watched Allium foliage emerge and grow two inches in one day on the south side of the house. I opened pruned quite a few of my roses and have the battle scars to prove it.

All in all, it was a fabulous March Sunday afternoon. I'm LOVING this early spring warm weather. Yes!