sprig to twig

Quite a few of us are bigger fans of foliage than of blossoms, so Pam’s brainstorm has us all aflutter. We can follow up Carol’s long-established Bloom Day with a post chronicling our standout foliage, then leave a comment on Pam’s entry so that like-minded bloggers can find us and share. This is my first time, and I am late (the target date is the 16th of each month). As with all things related to garden blogging, the rules are forgiving, so here goes:

Mahonia ‘Arthur Menzies’ knocked my socks off when I first saw it (in bloom). This one has been here for three years, the last two of which it formed long racemes of buds which were wiped out by bad weather. I don’t really mind, because the foliage looks like this all year. The ones at Cistus are 6′ tall, so it will only get better.

I keep adding heathers, but am not very good at keeping track of their names. This anonymous one snuggles up to Chamaecyparis ‘Barry’s Silver’.

In that same bed, the new foliage is showing up on the Rhus. I love the light, airy look and pale color at this stage.

Nothing seems to phase the Heucheras. They come through snows and deep freezes looking like this, and even seed around a bit. Think I’ll ever spot a sport to add to the growing horde?

The ‘Thunderhead’ pine is just a kid, but one of these days it will have started to sprawl and put forth the huge candles that attracted me to it in the first place.

Over in the vegetable patch, the rhubarb is beginning to push through the leafy mulch. See how crinkly and fresh the soon-to-be-huge leaves are at first.

Well, that was fun! Feel free to join in if you are a fellow foliage fancier. The more the merrier!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 1:40 am and is filed under firsts, events, gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.