Excuse for not blogging #1

Life got in the way.

I thought it had been just two or three weeks since I last blogged. Turns out it's been almost a month. No wonder my sister called and several regular readers e-mailed to ask if I'd quit blogging.

It wasn't my plan to disappear. Blogging just hasn't been at the top of my To Do list lately. Among other things, I've been reading a lot of non-fiction, working on a romance novel, and redesigning and updating my five-year-old website, which is definitely showing its age. (Don't go over there yet; I'll let you know when the new design and content goes live.)

It's a sunny morning here in my neighborhood, so after polishing off my morning pot of Earl Grey tea, I went out to inspect the garden. There were a few nice little surprises, as always, but mostly it's a mess. And just look how old man winter has ravaged my favorite chair. I'll have to sweet-talk my hunk o' burnin' love into scraping and repainting it again.

In the next week or so, this periwinkle (my favorite ground cover because it's always lush and green, chokes out weeds, ruffles charmingly in a good breeze, and intermittently sends up adorable little blue flowers) will completely cover the dead leaves and junk you see here, saving me the chore of raking.

The trunk you see in the photo belongs to one of my pink-flowering dogwoods, which aren't yet in bloom.

The daffodils are finally beginning to pop open. Here's a little bunch that clearly didn't get a sprinkling of fertilizer after it bloomed last year. Ah, well. I won't forget this time.

In the foreground of this photo you can see part of a large cluster of grape hyacinths that is just beginning to push up past the dead leaves.


Here's another bunch of daffs that was denied fertilizer. (And who left the garden hose out?)

In the foreground of this pic is another of my favorite groundcovers that's just beginning to pop up: the sometimes annoyingly invasive brunnera has heart-shaped leaves and for at least six weeks in the spring, sends up clusters of darling little blue flowers that look just like forget-me-nots.

Soon we'll visit the garden center to buy some primroses and pansies, and then I'll start taking my computer out to the patio and working from my "summer office."

This photo is from last spring, when I bought oodles of colorful primroses. We planted about two dozen of them, but so far, only a handful are coming up. Our fault, I think, for not raking the leaves off them after they went to sleep last fall.

More garden news later, as it develops. Stay tuned.