My Prince Has Come

As you might have guessed, I don't really think of myself as an overly traditional kind of girl. I'm not as avant garde as I thought I would become when I was younger, I'll admit, but I was rather righteously horrified when I got to college and discovered that more than one of my floormates were simply in college to find a man. "You can't be serious," I remember telling one girl, after I picked my jaw up off the floor, "because... really, Caroline, it's the 90's!"

I've never been the type to sit around waiting for my prince, so to speak, so the title of this post is kind of tongue-in-cheek. But I'm honestly very excited about my 'Ivory Prince' hellebores.

Graham Rice, the author (and blogger, at The Transatlantic Plantsman,) recently mentioned 'Ivory Prince' in a hellebore review for the UK's Daily Telegraph. And everything he said was true.

This is one tough beauty. Its blue-green leaves are evergreen (without all of the messy dieback you get from many hellebores) and the form is compact. Mine are in dry, nutrient-deficient soil and suffered through drought all summer--and they're planted where they get midday sun, to boot.

How do they reward me for my abuse and neglect? Apparently with dozens of pink buds that open up into gorgeous, creamy flowers in the spring. Amazing.

Elsewhere in my garden, some of the foliage from tulipa unknownii (tulips that I don't remember planting) are mingling nicely with a few of the established garden denizens. Here you see one clump of mystery tulip adding both color and texture in front of the 'Amber Waves' heuchera... and golden oregano, badly in need of a spring cleanup, skirting another clump.

You know it's been a long winter when you find yourself considering growing tulips purely for their foliage! But seriously, some of these compositions are so interesting in the spring garden that I really may not mind if these end up being hybrid tulips that I didn't pull last year, even if they fail to give me any flowers.

Last, but not least, no post of pics from my front yard in the spring could be complete without a few gratuitous shots of my bergenia! The ugly clump that I showed in a previous post was so horrible that I had to post a good bergenia shot to erase that from your memories.

You can see that it's greening up a bit in this week's warmer temperatures... it won't be too long before the red fades completely to a satisfyingly shiny, medium green. And then I'll stop posting pictures of it, I promise!

Well, I'll stop for a little while, anyway. At least a couple of weeks. :)