Why I Oughta...

Earlier this week, we had some snow fall overnight.  And flurries flew during the day.  It didn't last long, but the temperatures have hovered around freezing all week and I keep hearing people talk about how we're experiencing a "late Spring" this year.  The grass has green'd up, some of our ornamental grasses (the feather reed grasses) are up, tulips have pushed foliage (but no flowers) and I'm seeing some buds swell on our shrubs.  And, I keep going outside to do little garden tasks, but I haven't taken on any large scale ones.  Planting a few things, cleaning some parts of the garden up.  But, mostly....waiting.  Waiting for the weather.  Some of our perennials are moving ahead - despite the temperatures.  I see hosta tips (some cultivars), Brunnera tips and (as I posted yesterday) even peonies. But the trees?  They're still bare.  I wasn't sure how *normal* this is:  to have no leaves at all on any of our trees in mid/lat...

I've been worrying about our Dawn Redwood tree for the past four weeks.  I use the traditional fingernail scrape method on tree bark to see if trees are healthy and showing green right under the bark.  Our Dawn Redwood tree seemed to be very slow to start this Spring.  I was seeing other trees have buds set and begin to leaf out in some ways while this tree was seemingly stuck in neutral.  Making matters worse, my fingernail test wasn't showing any green on the trunk.  It wasn't brown.  And the limbs weren't cracking.  But, I wasn't seeing green like I was on our other young trees.   But, I don't have a Spring 2020 post in the garden diary here to show WHEN this tree needle'd out, so that gave me concern.  What was making me relax (a bit) was this post from 2019 when I show it being 'needle'd out' in early June of 2019 .  So, imagine my delight (and, frankly RELIEF!) when I walked out in the backyard and noticed the buds swelling an...

Last year, we added a Harry Lauder Walking Stick tree to our backyard after seeing it a drive-thru buying experience at the Growing Place in Aurora.  We first saw - and fell in love - with this curving, interesting tree at Disneyland Paris outside of their Haunted Mansion (called Phantom Manor ) and knew then that we should buy one of these contorted trees.  Where we planted it ended up being close to the 'focal point' we were trying to design along with the apex of the 'nook' that will (eventually) hid the fire pit area.  The tree came with a bamboo pole that the tree was growing around and I pretty much just left it as is after planting.   But on a garden walk around recently, I noticed that the tree had begun to really grow AROUND that bamboo pole - especially down near the bottom.  So, I went ahead and tried to remove the pole, but it turned out harder than I expected.  After some sawing, cracking and twisting, I was able to remove the central bam...

When we had our house built back in 2016/2017, one of the steps was the digging and installation of new sewer and water lines.  That required some serious digging from the center of the street all the way up to our house.  That digging was located fairly close to our large parkway tree - in fact it was so close that when we came to see the hole, we could see that the sewer guys had cut some of the roots.   Ever since then, I've been holding my breath with concern that the tree had suffered some damage.   I'm posting this in the [ garden dairy ] so I remember both what the canopy looks like in Spring but also what the color of the leaves look like, too.   Here, below, is the tree.  It is orange-ish/brown-ish.  Certainly NOT green like the rest of the maple trees around our neighborhood.   And, I'm content this year because I noticed the same thing last year.  This tree isn't suffering/stressed (at least I'm...