Happy Easter to eveyone! (It is Easter mroning here, so not late at all!). Here are a couple more pics I took in the garden a few days ago:

iris, hellebores (still blooming!), wood hyacinth, forget-me-nots (volunteers) and friends

more daffodils

Jackie

Buona Pasqua! The weather here in the Northeast US has turned balmy this week. It feels more like mid-May ... sunny, and getting into the 70s F. Cherries, magnolias, and forsythias are all in full bloom. Roses will start taking off soon!

Grazie, altrettanto! Even if we're a bit late. Sounds like a beautiful spring. Here it's still pleasantly cool, thank goodness, and tomorrow there's even a forecast of rain! The green is sumptuous, the earliest roses have begun to open, the peonies are forming buds, wild flowers, poppies, euphorbia, field sage, are blooming by the sides of the road. We're having a beautiful long season, and summer feels still reassuringly distant.

Happy spring to all. It's being nice here, too-hope it lasts and lasts...Wouldn't it be nice if the weather would just kind of stay like this all the way until fall? Just skip over summer weather entirely.

Bart, glad you too are getting nice conditions, and I agree with you that I could happily go on like this for a long time. I could take a month of summer weather, in July, and then the following month, "Agosto rinfresca il bosco." If only! At least it's cool and damp at the moment. And, for the long term, we keep planting and things keep growing.

This morning I was down at the far end of the garden, by the road. Nine years ago the neighbors' field below this area slumped badly, and the slump was propagating itself up onto our property. Since we didn't want our land, not to mention the entire hillside, to slide to the bottom of the valley, DH went down with a maul as big as he was, lengths of heavy rebar, and massive wood planks, and set himself to holding back the ground, driving in the stakes, backing them with the planks, and planting the area behind with hazelnuts and lilacs, good sturdy rooters. He was seventy-nine at the time: a young dude. It worked: the plants took, young oaks and other woodland trees began to grow; the ground stayed put; the lilacs marking the property boundary are handsomer every year; and a wood is developing. I was down there cleaning out brush so I got a good look. We need a lot of this in the world: trees, reforestation, coolness, shade. And one of the great things is, once you start a project like this, it tends to go forward on its own, with little intervention needed from the gardeners.