Northern Illinois doesn't have flowering dogwoods or rhododendrens, but we've got crabapples in abundance and never have they looked so good as they do right now, all over. The three days of unseasonable heat cooked all the tulips and daffodils except one that just opened, Narcissus poeticus, that Kathy, of Cold Climate Gardening, gave me last summer. Because of squirrel interference, only one of the three bloomed.
The heat also put an end to the Hepatica show, but brought on the last of the native woodland ephemerals.
The little merrybells is not having a good year. It has been crowded out by bigger plants, so that there is only one bloom.
It will be moved to a better location.
By contrast, it's been a great year for the Trilliums. Both Trillium flexipes
and the other white Trillium have doubled in size, and I found a lone T. sessile plant with just foliage.
Blooming for the first time this year are Phlox divaricata 'Montrose Tricolor', which is a wimpy little thing I'd be happy to unload on whoever wants it, and Phlox divaricata 'Lemon Slice', which I got last year from Plant Delights. 'Lemon Slice' is really strutting its stuff. I'm not seeing much of the yellow varigation in the foliage, but it did have ruby foliage all winter, making it much more showy than other Phlox divaricata.
The non-native Geranium sylvaticum 'Mayflower' and the native Geranium maculatum are blooming now too.
This darker flowered form might be the result of a cross with 'Mayflower'.
Enough with the text, on with the show.
Good scents:
and
along with the crabapple blooms make being in the garden a delight.
Finally, because it wouldn't be spring here at Squirrelhaven without them, a couple of Anemonellas.
Also blooming: a load of hellebores, the white and the pink single flowered Anemonellas, the redbud, the Chaenomeles, Tiarella 'Iron Butterfly' and 'Oakleaf', Heucherella 'Burnished Bronze', Zizia aurea and a bunch of stuff I've probably forgotten. (I'd forgotten the Brunneras, 'Jack Frost', 'Hadspen Cream', and 'Looking Glass', and Pulmonaria 'Roy Davidson', Muscari, little violets, Arisaema triphyllum, and Geranium macrorrhizum.
As always, thanks goes to Carol, of May Dreams Gardens, for hosting Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day.