Spring Colors: Yellow, Purple, Blue

I feel like I'm always blaming my garden successes on serendipity... but maybe I don't give myself enough credit. I admit that I bought these 'Queen of Night' tulips on a whim because I was entranced by their beautiful moodiness... but made a conscious decision to plant them where they would fill in space in the spring garden, and play off of the light green emerging foliage of the goatsbeard and switchgrass:


Notice that the fence has been stained recently? The grays unfortunately skipped from medium gray to black, so I had to settle for "Coffee" instead of dark gray as a fence color. The trellis I'm putting up is to help encourage my native honeysuckle to climb the fence.

(Annie in Austin introduced me to lonicera sempervirens, which you can see in her April Bloom Day Post, and I just had to add one to my High Country Gardens order last year. It's not so "sempervirens" for me up here, but it's healthy, has flower buds, and its glaucous foliage will look gorgeous against the brown fence in a few years.)

I had given up on these species tulips, tulipa tarda, which you see both above and below, because they are supposed to be early tulips and they hadn't even shown up by the time the greigii tulips all bloomed. They were a nice surprise this weekend!

I planted them next to the purple foliage of 'Regina' heuchera, which amazingly enough is in its second year in the same spot, knowing that their yellow and white petals should show up well against the colorful coralbells. I guess it just goes to prove that some spring bulbs are indeed "late" in the first year after planting.

Grape hyacinths are tucked in all along the driveway bed as well. Their color mixes nicely with the leaves of 'Othello' ligularia and a miniature hosta. When I bought the hosta at a Master Gardener sale, 'Dawn' was the name on the tag, but I'm not sure that is correct. It's pretty, either way.

More blue and gold in the same bed. These are the baby-blue flowers of the handsome 'Jack Frost' brunnera, underlighted by fresh sprigs of yellow creeping Jenny:

Circling back around to the fence again, we find 'Chocolate Chip' ajuga just starting to bloom under the watchful eye of a pretty hellebore. In the background, 'All Gold' hakonechloa brightens up the show at the start of a bed of sweet woodruff:

I know that some of you might be wringing your hands at the thought of the sweet woodruff. But I absolutely love the scent so I deal with this high-maintenance groundcover. It gets pulled out from around the brick retaining wall as soon as it's done blooming, and thus stays out of the flowerbeds. Three scaly Buckler ferns have no problem growing up through the woodruff, and my broken-but-still-beautiful bird bath adds some height to the corner.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how these parts of the backyard are shaping up--and that they seem to have a spring color theme is definitely an added bonus! But there are plenty of areas of the backyard that I am not about to show off just yet... much construction will commence now that I'm recovered from both the flu and the sinus infection that it left behind as a parting gift.

And then maybe I'll be brave enough to take pictures of the rest of the backyard to share. :)