Garden Bloggers Bloom Day - Valentine's Day Style

My difficult relationship with the color pink has been pretty well chronicled in this blog over the past couple of years. You can imagine my dismay when I downloaded all of my February Bloom Day pictures of things in bloom and flower, and found that they all contained... pink!

Some are more pink than others, but I'll show them all here anyway. This first is a temporary pink, as the little "lanterns" start out green, change to white and then pink (as you can see on the lower branches of this plant), and finally turn bright red and drop a little yellow "bell" when in full flower. This flowering maple is abutilon megapotamicum and you can click the link to see it in full flower on Plant Delights' website:

Also in dark pink is my fancy poinsettia from Christmas. The green leaves below are splotched with inky variegation, and so I am going to plant it outside in the spring and see what kind of interesting greenery it gives me for the summer and fall:

This is not technically a flower (nor is the color on the poinsettia above) but it fooled me into thinking it was, for a while... because crown of thorns does have salmon-pink flowers when it blooms.
I'm glad to see this plant, euphorbia milii, putting out new leaves whatever the color. It had been stressed over the winter--I had bought it in the fall, pot-bound and on clearance--and so I gave in and repotted it a few weeks ago, even though I had wanted to wait until spring. As you can imagine, moving it to a new pot was an adventure, but one made a whole lot easier with the assistance of basic kitchen tongs.

Last but not least, the promise of flowers to come! I had to scoop away the snow to show this tiny pink bud on my 'Ivory Prince' hellebore, and you can barely make out its existence between my middle and ring fingers. There are eight buds in total on my 3 'Ivory Princes' and they are all probably weeks away from bloom yet. So I covered the plant back up with snow after snapping this shot:
That's all from my NE Ohio garden for now. Got something in flower, bloom, bud, or winter color? Head on over to May Dreams Gardens and share your post with all the rest of us color-starved northern gardeners, please!