Crocuses in NH! It must be Spring even up there in cold country!

Lovely hellebores, suzabanana!

My first hellebore (and maybe the only one) bloomed today.

Hellebore 'Gold Finch"

I have more daffodils now.

'Jetfire'

'Toby the First'

'Rijnveld's Early Sensation' is still blooming.

Crocuses are still blooming too.

'Albus'

'Ruby Giant'

Crocus vernus

And my favorite bleeding heart is emerging.

'Gold Heart'

I just realized that every picture has oak leaves in it.

Claire

Great photos! Love the crocus, daffodils and bleeding hearts. That 'Gold' version is neat looking. And all the varieties of Hellebore are great! I moved some of mine into a foundation bed along the back of my house and they did much better this year than others that I didn't move in more exposed parts of the yard.

We've been out working in the garden two weekends in a row. Still haven't taken one photo yet. I should get out there today and do some of that. I have very little bleeding heart showing up and so far, only the white and the ferny version that blooms for a longer time. I really miss my huge pink bleeding hearts that used to push up these thick stems in a diameter of about a foot every spring. Whatever ate them two years ago, did a good job. I don't see one little stem of a pink bleeding heart in the garden. And I'm not wanting to replace them and see them disappear again. I still wonder why they chose the pink and not the white. [g]

I planted new bulbs in the fall and they have come up looking good. I bought a miniature daffodil mix from Scheepers and two very sweet small daffodil blooms just opened yesterday. Everything newly planted looks very sparse the first season though.

These are the new mini daffs out front. You really can't tell from the photo how small they are.

This patch of classics is in the back.

Just about everything in my front bed has come back, except one Salvia and a Gaura. And the jury is still out on a Perovskia that I moved.

I'm late this year. By now I usually have my front pots filled with pansies, but the last few years I haven't been as happy with pots of pansies, that are either suffering from late frosts and cold nights, or being assaulted way too soon with early hot weather. I'm wondering about waiting and planting something else that will grow through the summer.

And here are the first of the peas are finally showing up. I planted them when the soil hit 40 degrees on the 25th of March and they just started showing up over the weekend.

Since GW doesn't always allow me to post more than a few photos, I'll put more in another post...

Lots of stuff coming up right now. Apricot just bloomed yesterday:

Hellebores have been open for a while, but this one is going to town this year:

Today is day three (and probably the last) for the Sanguinaria — each year about one more comes up:

The Anemonella (or Thalictrum) thalictroides is another great ephemeral that seems to very slowly spread:

Plus some crazy blue Hyacinths I got last fall:

I’m kind of amazed that all this stuff survived the torrential rain yesterday.

That Hyacinth is more a purple color - very pretty! I'm amazed that apricot doesn't freeze in the spring around here.

A few more spring plants around the garden....

Gosh, you two are so far ahead of me. I have store-bought pansies and crocus only. My hellebores were buried under snow until about a week ago, so I haven’t even checked them. Most of my daffodils are just emerging, though one clump in the sunniest spot along the south foundation is up taller and I noticed some buds yesterday. I haven’t noticed any of the perennials above ground yet except the evergreen ones.

It seems like they just shot out of the ground this year. And it's 40F on my back porch this morning and it feels more like 30 with a strong wind sweeping across my front yard. I had to go out to water a patch of repaired lawn and I had to go back in for a hat and gloves and a jacket when I already had a wool turtleneck and sweatshirt on. [g]

And I've held my vegetable seedlings without putting them in too long, waiting for the nights to warm up more. They are already pot bound and I still have to dig out a place for them and it keeps raining. Ah...spring! lol

I will be planting my presprouted peas today.

That was a great idea, Babs. I soaked mine overnight, that was it. My soil was just 40 degrees when I sowed them, which is the minimum temperature. Would you sow presprouted seed at the same 40 degree soil temperature, I wonder? Or is your soil warmer by now?

I wish we could do an experiment, but my growing area is not full sun, so I couldn't compare. [g] I'd like to know how long it takes to see growth above ground when you sow your pre-sprouted seeds. Maybe I should try that next year.

I just checked my soil temps where I would sow peas or beans and in one area it is only up to 55 degrees, which has more leaf mulch on it, which I should have removed by now - and the other area, where my peas are already up an inch, the temp was almost to 60 degrees only. Still too cool for beans.

I didn’t check my soil temperature because my experience is that once sprouted, they just go into suspended animation until the soil is a temperature they like; they don’t rot. My garden is in full sun, but was still under snow three weeks ago and got in inch or so of sleet a week ago, so it is still fairly cool. I will try to remember to keep an eye on them for you so you know how long it takes, but I have done this for years with almost 100% successful sprouting.

Oh, I don't doubt they will all sprout and succeed, I just wondered if it actually would save me any time and get peas growing earlier than doing it the other way.

I like it because it means I don’t have to time my pea planting as carefully, and so I do get peas earlier and tend to have a longer season therefore. Otherwise I would wait until I knew that the soil was warm enough that they wouldn’t rot, so they would get planted later.

That makes sense. I'll have to try it.

I have also,learned through experience that it is a whole lot easier to put in the pea fence when I plant them rather than waiting because I often don’t notice until they are several inches high. So my peas are planted and the fence is up, and I next need to add some Mylar pinwheels and perhaps some blood meal and or head high fishing line in the garden since there were some deer hoof prints.

I'm a little concerned with a rabbit I've seen around all winter. The only thing I've noticed that has been 'chewed' are crocus, but I'm about to put my seedlings in my beds today and sow lettuce seed. When you mention mylar pinwheels, I wonder if that would be a deterrent for a rabbit? Where did you get yours?

My trellises are up year round and I used cattle panels. I've been happy with that arrangement. I hoped to add more clover to my lawn to satisfy a bunny, but lawn work is always at the bottom of the spring list.

Sorry you have to deal with deer - that has to be very difficult.

Miniature daffodils are blooming on the south side of the house. I didn't realize they were miniatures when I bought them at Ocean State Job Lots. I think this is the third spring for them and already they have multiplied a lot. Chives are up. I haven't really gotten out in the garden but I see some green in the mess of old dead grass/etc. which I'm pretty sure are oriental poppies. Salad burnet is also up in the herb garden. Creeping thyme is a mess and needs some cutting. I should probably dig out half of it.

I'm going to have to measure the height of the new mini daffs I have coming up. I don't even know the name of the variety because they were in a mix, but I didn't realize they came this small. So very cute. The reason I got them, is to have less of an issue with dying foliage. And it is along a pathway so you can see them up close. I'm glad to hear they multiply - I think I put mine too close together. I do that all the time. [g]

I am determined to remove my golden thyme that I planted at the end of all my raised vegetable beds. It is just a complete mess and takes so much work to get it in shape for the season every year. Granted I don't have to pay any attention to it the rest of the season, but, it really has become a job I don't look forward to doing. And when I ask someone else in the family to help out with that job, they feel the same way. What faces they make...lol.

I just used my chives for the first time. I put them in a smoothie yesterday morning. I think I would do it again, but maybe a little less than two handfuls. [g]

We have a lots of deer around, but typically they don’t bother the garden and are cautious around people due to hunters. This spring they have been right near the house, not the usual distance away. I think I will keep out a watch and periodically chase them away. That has worked in the past. The mechanical items will be for backup.

I get my mylar pinwheels at the dollar store, thanks to pixielou.

Note to myself: plant some Hellebores this year.

this week I finally see most of my perennials coming back: bluebells, Hosta, ferns, lilies, Solomon’s seal, iris, anemone, clematis, Roses, peonies, astilbe. Squirrels are busy digging and eating so it’s a constant battle for me.

crocus flowered first, now tulips. Wonder what’s next.

What a cute little vignette, sbrklyn!

and MeyerMike, I will look forward to seeing your pond as it progresses over the year.

Pussy willow flowers are blooming. The squirrels haven't been chewing the branches off yet.

And good old forsythia - my signal to transplant rugosa rose suckers that were beginning to encroach on the path.

My pierises should have been in full bloom. They had good flower buds throughout the winter, but the erratic spring temperature swings - warm, cold, warm, cold, warm, cold, warm - seem to have dessicated them.

This 'Mountain Fire' was particularly affected, but other pierises are showing similar damage. There are no blooms at all.

I'm also seeing leaf damage on hollies.

Claire

The willows, forsythia, and daffodils are lovely! I can empathize about the evergreen damage since many of my rhodies look pretty bad this spring.

Claire, that pussy willow is SO pretty! I am used to see it with closed buds in the stores. Very nice! And I love Pieris, but I couldn't get them to grow in any degree of healthy or vigorous. They always looked awful, so they had to be taken out. Oh well.

I have hollies and this year, they've had less winter damage than I can ever remember. I wondered if it wasn't because I had so little snow cover?

Our forsythia outside aren’t blooming, but the forcing worked! I actually feel anxious about which of my new plantings made it through winter, especially the ones that went into the ground in early fall. Waiting...

Warm weather over the last few days, both days in the 60s and nights above 40, has speeded things up considerably. The daffodils in the first photo were barely above ground a week ago.

Oooo! NHBabs-- so exciting! I'm just a bit behind you, so I love seeing your status!

Definitely Spring, NHBabs - so pretty!

I was out looking at other things and I took the path back that's usually not direct (I needed to get to my car).

Rhododendron 'Mary Fleming' has started blooming!. She always surprises me so early. I keep thinking I should move her to a more visible area but she seems really happy there so I don't.

The big Dicentra 'Gold Heart' is leafing out well. I bought a new little one from Bluestone Perennials and planted it next to the big one a week or so ago. The little one came with blooms so it's ahead, but it shows what the big one will look like soon.

I actually planned to plant it somewhere else but changed my mind when I realized that the miscanthus next to the big dicentra had died last year leaving an empty spot. I hate empty spots in the garden, and I decided two Gold Hearts side-by-side would be outrageous in front of my porch.

New little Gold Heart:

There's a self-seeded daffodil in another area that just opened and looks unlike any of my other daffodils. I'm curious to see what it's going to do next and whether it gets established.

Claire

A lot is blooming in your yard, Claire! And that daffodil is wonderful looking!

Deanna - nice arrangement of forsythia branches. Very pretty! We have forsythia shrubs just started blooming here.

Babs, looks like your plants just shot out of the ground, like ours, with a few warm days. What variety of daffodil are in that first photo?

Claire - I've never seen a daffodil like that! Very unusual - it looks green and striped - is that right?

PM2, I am great about most plant names, but my daffodils are just daffodils. They have all been there close to 20 years, and I don’t remember any names at all. Sorry!

PM2: I checked the No-ID daffodil this morning, two days after the last photo. The petals? sepals? seem to be green and white striped with a yellow furry swath down the middle. I'm assuming this is a seedling from a seed pod on one of my other daffodils, but I've never noticed a seed pod (which doesn't mean there weren't any, just that I didn't see them).

A seed pod would probably form after the daffodil flowers are attractive and while the leaves were yellowing. This is a time when I ignore my daffodils.

I'm just going to leave it be and watch it. I hope it survives.

Claire

Amazing!

Are we sure it is a daffodil...lol! Yes, amazing, I've never seen anything resembling that in any bulb catalog I've ever seen! You might send a photo to one of the bulb companies and see what they think of it. :-)

PM2: I'm assuming it's a daffodil for lack of a better ID, although I can't rule out an extra-terrestrial seeking to colonize my garden.

I've had another unusual, but no way near as unusual, daffodil appear a few times (in 2014 and 2017). These also appeared in late April and I just figured they were variants of my other daffodils.

I'll let the latest one develop and then maybe send a photo to Brent and Becky's Bulbs.

Claire

LOL Claire. We just watched E.T. again, over the weekend and I'm reminded of a pot of flowers that died and ET brought back to life. You don't have a shed in your yard, an extra-terrestrial could be camping out in right. ;-)

That's a pretty variation too. Maybe B&B could also identify which variety of daffodil you have that might be making this kind of a seedling. I have not seen even one seedlings ever from any of our bulbs, but I routinely deadhead to allow the bulbs to gather more energy for the next year. But seeing your results, maybe I should try leaving some of the seedpods to see what happens. :-)

Once that amazing daffodil is propagated, I'm going to brag that I "know" you. :-D

Our April is overwhelmingly cloudy. Rename us Venus. Everything is just waiting, waiting, waiting in suspended animation for warmth, but our rain is off the charts! Haven’t had a sunny day since Thursday the 18th, and a few hours of morning sun tomorrow morning is all we’ll get this week. Except for crocuses, I have only one bloom, my rock cress. Tulips in background are nowhere near ready to bloom.

I can't understand why there is so much rhododendron damage. We had such a wet fall. I thought damage was usually due to lack of moisture.

Defrost, I have been wondering the same thing. We went into winter with plants well hydrated, and at least here we didn’t have particularly cold temperatures compared to most winters. The plant parts below snow line look fine. I have 20 year old plants, including rhodies and mountain laurels that look dead, with every leaf brown. I will hold off with any pruning in the hopes that they will revive, but in almost 40 winters in NH I have never seen so much damage on broad leafed evergreens. Perhaps wind was drying or the combo of rain followed by cold temperatures locked up soil moisture into ice more than most years? I don’t know, but it seems fairly universal as I drive around. The only rhodies I have that seem to have little damage are the PJM group of small-leafed rhodies.

I recently posted about damage on my new rhododendrons planted last year, which is severe, on the Az/Rh forum (and this one, I think?). This response from akamainegrower seems to sum it up:

"This past winter was the most difficult I've experienced in what is now close to 40 years of growing rhododendrons. Large rhododendrons, some of which were planted at least 30 years ago, were very badly damaged and some, including two large Percy Wisemans, appear to have been killed outright. The 2018-2019 winter followed another very hot and dry summer, so rhodendrons were first stressed by that despite attempts to provide enough water. Then we experienced unusually cold temperatures in November before rhododendrons had fully hardened off. Almost every snow storm ended up turning to rain which then froze into solid ice which does not provide the insulation of snow. Heavy wet snow and ice also collapsed many fabric shelters. Temperatures also fluctuated dramatically from near 0 to well above freezing time and time again. By far the most damaging aspect, however, was the repeated instances of unusually high winds."

His summary is what we experienced here. Lots of wind, temps were not dangerous but ice was common. I would never have known that those conditions were so bad. But, I will certainly say I was worried in our dry summer, and very grateful for the rain in fall. If we have a third dry summer, I'm thinking I need to do some deep watering of the established rhododendrons. Interestingly enough, NONE of my older rhododendrons seem in the least bit phased by anything, and they are old. It is just my new ones that are suffering. At last three are outright dead (but I was zonal pushing with those, I'll admit), and several more on the edge, waiting to see what will happen. The non-evergreen azaleas are fine, I hope. Here is the link to my original post.

NHBabs, I know you posted on that original thread. Do you have any thoughts?

P.S. I think a third dry summer won't be too friendly to my hostas planted in late 2015 and summer of 2016. I assume they're not reaching potential without adequate moisture. Empress Wu still looks more like a eunuch than an empress.

The rain you didn’t get, we did get here in central NH, so our conditions going into winter were really different from yours. I had read Akamainegrower’s response, but the fact that so many rhodies and mt. laurels here were also severely damaged is puzzling to me. Your combo of dryness, wind, and problems with new plants likely means that they didn’t get enough moisture to carry them through winter. But I have well established plants that have good winter shade that came out of a warmer and wetter than usual winter looking dreadful. And I have mine all planted in well drained soil, so too damp roots shouldn’t have been an issue either.

That's right. I forgot you all had adequate rain last summer. It is a mystery then.

Another mystery, I might have lost some Brunnera, 'Jack Frost' and similar varieties. The oldest were two-three years old, the youngest planted last year. I thought those were bulletproof, and they're rated for cold hardiness much colder than here. I hope they're late to leaf out, but I would have thought they'd be showing their faces before now. The Pulmonarias just beside them are doing fine and are about 3" high.

UPDATE: Just read online that they can be short-lived (well, I was wrong on that) and should be divided. My oldest ones didn't look like they were ready for division. I really liked them. (sigh)

I've been feeling that I have less damage than usual. Granted I only have a couple of Azaleas and not Rhododendrons - does that make a difference? The only thing I've had that is damaged, which never is - is a very large patch of Arctostaphylos. It spreads as a ground cover - started in a bed, and went up over the rock edge into the mulched path in front of it. The only part of it that has winter damage is the part that is over the rocks.

I have a number of Blue Hollies and usually they have a fair amount of damage and brown, dead leaves I'm pulling off in the spring, this year, very very little damage at all. So I thought - maybe it's not the cold that damages them but the snow cover, which we had very little of this year.

As for the rainy, cloudy weather, we've broken the record for number of rainy days in April. The old record was 16 days of rain which was set a long time go, and we are on Day 18 already. The one good thing about this weather, is that it extends the display on bulbs. Sometimes we get a few days of early high temperatures, just as the daffodils are opening and then they don't last at all. I am enjoying my bulbs this year except that some of the Hyacinths are drooping from all the rain. All the perennials seem to be loving this rain and I'm sure later on we'll find that if we have a drought, they'll be a little more resilient.

I'm not sure what's happening here, Essentially all of the flower buds on my pierises were killed off over the winter and some of the leaves were damaged. Yet there are blooming pierises all over the neighborhood and one next door. I think it may have been the winds combined with severe temperature swings. The blooming plants all seem to be more sheltered than mine.

My rhododendrons are mostly fine except for Percy Wiseman. I have to cover Percy Wiseman over the winter because the squirrels eat the buds. A lot of the leaves are damaged and maybe dead but there is some intact foliage.

The American and blue hollies have a fair amount of leaf damage - I don't usually see much at all. There's a lot of holly leaf spot on the foliage of one of the American hollies but that's on a holly that was already stressed due to storm damage last year.

My feeling is that the repeated temperature swings from very cold to very warm to very cold stressed all of the plants and then any added challenges like dessicating winds were too much for some.

I'm rooting for good rain to continue this spring, at least until the Gypsy Moth caterpillars hatch. The rain will promote growth of the fungus that killed off the caterpillars a few years ago. I don't see any egg masses on the trees so it's good so far.

Claire

You make some good points, Claire, and it seems like we all have individual conditions that are at play here.

As for the rainy, gray weather - something else it is great for is moving perennials and shrubs and sowing seeds. I sowed clover into a lawn patch and some California Poppies along the edge of a bed and they've all come up great with no effort from me.

One more thing I just thought of: humidity. While there's been a lot of rain lately, the humidity in between the rain/snow events was very low over the winter. I normally don't pay much attention to humidity but I've been running a humidifier in the house for health reasons and I watched the outdoor humidity on Weather Underground.

The low humidity would have pulled a lot of water out of the plants, and the roots may not have been able to replenish it from the soil if it was dry or frozen. We had minimal snow cover last winter.

Claire

April is winding down but I have a few things to post.

The big Dicentra 'Gold Heart' is beginning to bloom which makes my porch steps a pleasure to use. That's Geranium Biokovo leaves at the foot of the Dicentra.

And Rhododendron 'Mary Fleming' is still blooming in a shady area.

Amelanchier and crabapples are showing new flower buds but not yet photo-worthy.

Claire

Weird things are afoot. My two pieris are mostly fine, with only one having a dead area in back.

My huge rhododendrons are perfectly happy, even thought the little ones were nearly strangled to death by winter and wind.

And I am going to increase the number of sempervivens I have. I am very pleased with how they fill in the cracks between large stones.

I have lots of trout lilies, but not all are at blooming age. I can't wait for them all to be old enough to bloom. They seem to be spreading far and wide in the garden areas of the yard. It's still early, but when bloom time comes I'll post a pic.